How much is a property photo worth?
In the climatic final scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant declare their love amidst a heavy downpour. Fortunately for Andie and Hugh, London’s climate that day produced sufficient lighting to illuminate Andie’s face for the perfect camera shot. Lucky Hugh.
In case you don’t share the production team of Four Weddings’ good fortune with the weather-producing lighting, I’ve been investigating whether the quality of lighting (and other factors) makes a difference when you sell your home.
You should care about the quality of your property photos because first impressions count. The producers of Four Weddings knew that getting the lighting right in that final scene would be enjoyed by viewers who would pay to see it again, thus increasing box office takings. In the same way, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that achieving better property photos leads to a higher selling price.
Most of the research on property photos comes out of the USA; Realtor Magazine — the official magazine for REALTORS — found that listed properties with professional photographs were viewed 61% more than other properties listed at a similar price. And those extra viewings count. Further research undertaken by real-estate brokerage, Redfin, evidenced that better quality photographs increased selling prices of mid-priced properties by 1%-2%. The value of an average UK property worth £256,000 could increase by between £2,500 and £5,000.
That’s not all. As well as pocketing the extra cash, a property with better photographs takes three weeks less time to sell than one with average photographs. If you want more money, and you want it fast, read on.
Professional photographers are often happy to generate extra income with property shoots, since they can fill in their quiet times. If you’re selling your home, begin by talking to your estate agent who will have photography contacts you can reach out to. To be honest, a good agent should insist on decent photographs, since faster sales at higher prices suit them too. But no-one is prepared for a bad weather day, and if you haven’t got the Four Weddings’ lighting team on stand-by, then even the best photographer will struggle. There are solutions — Doctor Photo can manually edit your photos to give them a facelift and they can even remove a car from your drive for better results.
There seems to be a life hack for everything these days! If this is all too much trouble then try facelifting your property images with artificial intelligence via a new service from Autoenhance.ai. Simply drag and drop your images into the web app and download the enhancement to make your images look like they were shot on the best day of summer. The process only takes seconds.
Try this out at autoenhance.ai
Try object removal out with dctr.co.uk
Check out the second part of this blog.
Citations
REDFIN research
NAR research
Zhang, Shunyuan and Lee, Dokyun and Singh, Param Vir and Srinivasan, Kannan, How Much Is an Image Worth? Airbnb Property Demand Estimation Leveraging Large Scale Image Analytics (May 25, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2976021. or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2976021
