A prospective buyer’s gripe

[poorgradstudent]

It drives me crazy when we see a house and I go to look at the MLS pictures later and there are entire rooms missing.

If the home is a 3br/2ba unit, there should be pictures of all three bedrooms and BOTH bathrooms (many listings seem to fail on the latter).

I guess the flipside is I kind of like places with bad pictures, as they presumably get less interest and are less likely to draw competition.

[an]

Ideally, I agree with you. However, you have to think of those pictures as marketing materials. Why show something when it doesn’t put your listing in the best light? It can also be just laziness. They might think, oh, the room has no upgrade but it’s in livable condition, so why bother showing pictures of it. The pictures are there to pull you, the buyer, into the house and go see it. So, you’d only want to show the best picture of the house.

[spdrun]

MLS listings cost money, no? Do they charge for image hosting as well I wonder?

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=AN]Ideally, I agree with you. However, you have to think of those pictures as marketing materials. Why show something when it doesn’t put your listing in the best light? It can also be just laziness. They might think, oh, the room has no upgrade but it’s in livable condition, so why bother showing pictures of it. The pictures are there to pull you, the buyer, into the house and go see it. So, you’d only want to show the best picture of the house.[/quote]

I suppose. I know there have been plenty of threads making fun of terrible listing pictures here, but I do think it’s mostly laziness and ineptitude rather than an intentional strategy. The old “six cameraphone pictures snapped of a half-clean house” is still fairly common.

[njtosd]

The agents that we’ve worked with have felt that bathrooms shouldn’t be pictured unless they are large and beautiful. In general, the average powder room or kids’ bathroom doesn’t photograph well. In the opinion of the agents, the pictures should show the most marketable points of the house, rather than being informational. In your circumstance, if you are still a “poorgradstudent” you’re probably looking at a starter house, or something close, and your concerns are more practical. Depending on where you’re looking, many floorplans can be found on the internet (if you know the name of the development), which helps complete the picture.

[Author]

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