What Zillow Tells Us about Property Photo Priorities

I've previously written that real estate agents need to take more photos of their listings since photos play such a large role in telling the story of a property and save home buyers time.

My two theories on why we don't see more photos of homes are:

1. Some agents are lazy
2. Some agents don't think their client's less-than-stellar homes will benefit from photos, which is ridiculous since buyers will obviously walk through the house before making an offer.

While it's easy to blame the agents who are being paid to market homes on behalf of their clients, what happens when the agents are taken out of the marketing equation?

Enter Zillow's new Make Me Move feature where home owners can create a listing for their own home with a "Make Me Move" price that they'll supposedly take for their home if offered that price. In this situation, home owners are marketing their own properties. Do we see more photos when listings are in the hands of home owners?

Here is a map of a few Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota neighborhoods. Minneapolis to the West of the Mississippi River and St. Paul to the East. This area has just over 1000 residential properties. Of those, twenty home owners have configured "Make Me Move" offers for their properties (blue flags). How many of the twenty properties have at least one photo of the property? Only two.

Eight home owners are using Zillow's for sale by owner feature. Of those eight homes, four have photos.

While the sample size here is small, it makes sense that people more actively trying to sell their homes (for sale vs. make me move) are going to work a bit harder to create compelling listings.

Home owners appear to be just as lazy, if not more, than agents when it comes to taking property photos, which may explain why more agents don't take photos of homes they represent: Home owners who won't take pictures of their own properties probably don't expect their agents to either.

Jim, if you had to pick 5 photos of a home, what shots would you want to see? What shots of additional rooms, garage, yard, interior, exterior, basement, bathrooms, etc. wouldn't you want to see?

To me, the point isn't to get people to contact agents quicker. It's to qualify consumers further before they contact an agent. If I was an agent, I'd MUCH rather talk to someone who's looked at 25 photos of a home than five.

Hi Ed, it's David from Zillow --
This is an interesting analysis, thank you! I'm going to point out your post to our analysts -- maybe they'll be able to let us know what this phenomenon looks like at a national level.

When my wife and I were looking for our first home two years ago we looked at over 500 MLS listings online BEFORE we even started looking at homes in person. I'm sure there were some good homes that we never even looked at due to poor listings. The more pictures a listing had the more I would click on it. I dug up our "home buying folder" where we printed off listings that we wanted our home buyer to make appointments at along with the listings he arranged for us to see.

... wait for it... 100% of the MLS listings we (on our own) decided we wanted to visit had photos. Not ONE single listing didn't have pictures and of the 28 listings we printed out 2/28 had 2 photos, 5/28 had 3 photos, and 21/28 of the listings had 5+ photos of the property.

In hindsight, as a potential home buyer I wanted to see EVERY room, multiple angles of the lot.

As for the CONTENT of the photos, thats an entirely different article. Quality versus Quantity certainly does come into play. Frankly, I don't want to see the spare bedroom some adults 'antique doll collection'. I want to see a room that shows it's layout and perhaps some items/furnature in the room to frame the shot and give me an idea of how big the room *really* is.

As for my friends at the office that are currently shopping for homes they ALL are using the Internet to view MLS listings and they all agree... "no photos = no viewing" for them. I have a feeling that the 30-year old generation is letting technology and the Intertubes do the heavy lifting for them before letting a real estate agent drag them around by the nose.

I have to agree that photos will draw me to a listing, and more photos that give me a true "picture" of the home can potentially move that property up on my list. With very little time to go out to showings, I can easily eliminate homes by looking at the photos. I'd like to see photos of each room on the listing - and exteriors, especially if there are special features such as a workshop, shed or deck/patio.

My guess is that photos are not overlooked simply because some realtors may be lazy... for a photo to help in selling, I think it should be as neat as you would want the home at a showing. For that, it would take the owner's time to de-clutter and clean the space to be photographed.

That being said, what I would like to see added to listings online is FLOORPLANS. How is that 10x8 kitchen laid out? What rooms are next to each other? These are questions that can (for now) only be answered in a walk-through, unless you are looking for new construction. And that neighborhood information from a previous post would be an excellent addition for those of us who didn't grow up in the Cities.

I agree with Ed that the reason some agents don't post more photos on their sites is because they are lazy. I previously relied on a webmaster to update the properties on my site, and felt awkward continually chasing him to take properties off and put new ones on. It also cost a wack in monthly website management costs.

I have since had a programmer set up a control panel that allows me to alter my website myself, without having to know anything about HTML or writing a website. It is therefore much easier for me to manage the photos on the site, and I have become a lot less lazy!!

I find a lot of mls photos showing snow covered homes in the middle of July. Obviously, many agents are lazy.

However, I don't think it is helpful to inundate buyers with many photos. Curiousity still sells better than over information. If you were posting photos of yourself on a dating service site, you would probably not photograph your armpits.

Pick a handful of your best photos of a home and leave it at that. You are not trying to get offers by posting photographs. You are only trying to stimulate interest.

Comments

1. Posted by: Jim Latimer on February 28, 2007 5:12 PM:

Is there an increase in risk that a home will be a target for crime if even a small portion of the contents is public ally visible?
Do homeowners worry about showing a catalogue of their belongings to potential burglars and should realtors that advise sellers to publish these images be concerned about liability?
I would not be surprised to find that many people consider this when deciding what to publish.. are they right to worry? I guess it depends on how nice their stuff is.
Personally, I like to see images but 25 pictures is not going to get me to contact the agent any faster than 5 will.

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