How to Prepare a Home for Listing Photography

Hey, everybody. Today we are going to talk about how to prepare a home for a shoot. This applies to both agents and homeowners. I’m Jason May with Realiant Photography.

Let’s get into it. Previously, we talked about what we can and can’t do, whether because of ethical considerations or editing limitations. This is a follow-up to that video. Here, we’re going to focus on what happens before and during the shoot so the house is ready for strong images.

Let’s start with a question. Have you ever wondered why some listing photos stand out as especially clean, sharp, and polished? Often, it is not only how they are photographed or what the house looks like. It is also how the home is staged or, when it is owner-occupied, how it is cleaned and prepared.

Let’s get into the things you can do to help the house look its best when we arrive. Things that we can do include opening and closing doors is needed, adjusting faucets, opening and closing blinds if we can reach them. I’m not very tall. As well as just really simple things like straightening out rugs and mats, turning on and off lights and fans and fires, things like that.

Obviously, that’s no problem. That’s included in our service. That is something that we do. But any items of personal nature, we really like not to touch anything valuable, anything heavy.

We have to show up and shoot the house as is. We can’t really help you totally reorganize everything for the photos once we’re there because that just kind of wastes everybody’s time. So I want to set you up for success so that when I show up or we show up, anybody on the team, we can just get right in and get going and take those photos. So a few little steps.

We’re going to start here looking at a beautiful outside of a house that I recently shot. Such an awesome shoot. It was the perfect example of what a owner-occupied home should look like. Keep in mind as we go through these, this is an owner-occupied home that is currently being lived in.

This is not professionally staged. Someone’s just living here. This is not a multimillion dollar house either. This is a practical standard that many occupied homes can reach with preparation.

So just some general things before we get into the actual specifics here. It’s just good to thoroughly clean the whole property and just do the obvious of make sure everything is nice and clean for the outside. Mow the lawn, make sure the exterior is tidy, and consider a landscaper when the property needs one. Strong preparation helps the photos present the property clearly.

So let’s hop right into the actual exterior here and talk about that specifically. So obviously we want the garage closed. If you want to wash off your patio or your front porch or your driveway, do it with plenty of time so that it can dry. So that any water stains are not on it and it’s nice and dried off.

If you have garbage bins, even around the side of the house, sometimes we can see over there. So put it in the garage or way down the street or something and that’ll just set you up for success. As you can see here, this house looks picture perfect. It was picture perfect.

So let’s just take a look at an example of just what a house may look like. Again, this is not trying to shame anybody or to be silly, but just sometimes, I mean, all the time almost houses are being lived in, right? So you got a car, you got a few things out. Obviously, you can know to move the car.

Everybody knows that. But even like a hose reel and this yard is not too bad. But the difference between this yard and the yard in the previous image is huge when it comes to the value of selling the house. And that’s not saying that the house in the second one had a super bad yard.

Just a little overgrown. There’s nothing wrong with that. But do your best to get it all nice and cleaned up. My little pro tip here is if you ordered drone photography, which I think we should really be doing for every listing, be sure to move your cars like at least 100 feet away from the house because we like to give nice big overview shots and big neighborhood shots.

So just putting it on the curb by the house is not going to get it done. All right, let’s move on to the inside of the house. And I do just really want to reiterate this is a owner-occupied home. They are currently living there.

I cannot drill that point in enough. And again, this is not a super, super crazy high dollar house. It’s a very nice house. Don’t get me wrong.

But this is not some multimillion dollar mega mansion. All right. So we need every light on in the house that you can get. We are happy to come in and turn them on.

But if you have it ready to go, even better, all the blinds open, all the lights on, fans off, fireplaces off, if you have windows with an exceptional view and you want to pop the screen out, that will be a really pro move because a screen can mess with the camera lens. And I know it’s a pain. I know sometimes they get bent and whatever.

But if you have an amazing view, it really might be worth it. So we’re going to take a look here. You can see in the example here that is quote unquote messy. It’s not like it’s bad.

This looks like a perfectly normal, nice, lived in home that I would be happy to take photos of as is. There’s nothing wrong with this. But a couple of personal photos on the wall, a little bit of clutter, so it is not quite as polished as the previous example. And it’s just a really subtle difference.

But I’m sure you can see it as well. So I know I’ve been kind of going on with these first couple examples here. We’re going to get through the others a little quicker. If you want to find this checklist, we have a agent prep checklist on our website, which we will link for you with all of these steps and everything.

So let’s get through some more examples here. So moving on to the next one, we have the kitchen. Again, what I like to say here is clear, clean and straight and clear, clean and straight and it’s a little bit of a tongue twister, clear, clean and straighten everything, clear it off. If there’s anything that you can take off items of a personal nature.

And that’s just like a beautiful little centerpiece or like one of those cherry, apple, red, KitchenAid mixers that’s gorgeous. Leave that obviously because it looks nice, but just clear off wherever you can clear off. Kind of the saying is if you can turn the house upside down and shake it and it falls off, take it off.

Again, if it’s something really nice, nice little appliance, a little centerpiece, that’s great, which is kind of my pro tip. If you can put some little fruit basket or something in the middle of the island or the kitchen table, that’s a real good pro tip to go against the rule of clear everything off and make it look really nice.

Clean, obviously the cleaner and shinier the surfaces, the nicer and more pro it’s going to look and then straighten things like a rug or a mat anywhere throughout the house.

Making sure those lines are nice and straight will make the photos look straight because even if I take a straight photo of a room, but it has a slightly crooked rug, the whole photo is going to look crooked because the room is straight, but the rug’s not. So as you can see here, there’s just a few personal items around, the lights aren’t all on.

For a house like this with a million lights, there’s a million light switches. I can go hunt them all down, but the owner knows where they all are. So if you can get that all ready to go, that’s great. And like I said, clear, clean, straighten, just swipe it all off, clean it all up, straighten everything out and you’re going to be good to go.

When in doubt, just blinds open, lights on, clean up and shove it all into the closets. We don’t take pictures inside closets usually. Sometimes we don’t do garages. So use those spaces to put all your crap and just get it all out of the way because it will generally look cleaner in the photos.

Even if you have stuff around that looks nice, sometimes still just getting rid of it will just clean it up. So let’s move on here. We’re going to go head into the bedroom. Now this bedroom looks fantastic.

It is clean. It is clear. It looks like it is just professionally done. It’s not.

It was just the owner. They just really knew what they were doing. They worked with their agent. So everybody was in understanding of exactly what to do.

And then again, I don’t need to reiterate every single point of time here. We can take a look at our alternate image here. Again, it’s not bad, but at this point you can see what needs to happen. We’re going to move right along into the bathroom here.

And you can see this amazing shower. And again, you can see once we go to our next one here, there’s just some stuff in it, which is normal for a shower. And yeah, it might feel weird to take all your stuff out of the shower, but you saw that other image. It just looks better.

So I hope this little video here helped you. The whole point was to show a very normal nice lived in house that wasn’t exactly like destroyed. Going above and beyond to clean it up can help the house present better. I can see the difference.

I’m sure you can see the difference. Your seller can see the difference. Potential buyers may also notice the difference. Until next time, I’m Jason May with Realiant Photography.