Six Bedrooms in Lincolnshire. The One Nobody Expects Is in the Basement.
Barry Jilin of United Realty Group brought us a house on Clarice Avenue in Lincolnshire. Six bedrooms, four baths, 5,401 square feet across three finished floors, built in 2008.
That is a large house, and large houses have a specific problem on MLS: everything photographs the same. Six bedrooms become six photos of a bed. The buyer scrolls past all of them.
So before we shot anything we went through the floor plan and picked the order. Not the order we would walk the house — the order someone scrolling would want it.
THE BEST THING IN THE HOUSE IS A SAUNA, AND IT GOES LAST
Behind the basement bathroom there is a cedar sauna. Tiered benches, a stone heater, the whole thing.
It is the most interesting room in a 5,401 square foot house and it is in the basement, which means in a normal listing sequence it shows up at photo twenty-two, after the laundry room, to an audience that left at photo nine.
Our rule on a house like this is that the unusual thing anchors the set. It leads the social edit and it closes the gallery — teased at the front, paid off at the end. The front exterior gets you in. The sauna is why you remember which listing it was.
That is not a photography decision so much as a sequencing one, and it is free. It just requires looking at the floor plan before picking up a camera.
A ROOM WITH TWO STORIES OF WINDOW
The family room is 561 square feet — roughly 25 by 24 — and it is open to the second floor, with a curved bank of bay windows running up the full height.
Rooms like this break automatic exposure. The windows are five or six stops brighter than the wall under the balcony, so the camera picks one: either the glass is white and the view outside is gone, or the room is correctly lit and the ceiling is a black cave.
The fix is brackets, shot wide enough to hold both ends, then blended so the window keeps its view and the underside of the balcony still has detail. There is a lit fireplace in the frame too, which is a third exposure problem in the same photograph.
The curved staircase next to it has the opposite issue — it is a shape, not a space. Shot flat it reads as a railing. Shot from the floor looking up through the open side, you can see it curve the whole way and see the room it opens onto at the same time.
896 SQUARE FEET WITH NOTHING TO BOUNCE OFF
The basement recreation room is 896 square feet, about 38 by 38, with a pool table, foosball and a gym at the far end.
Basements are the hardest rooms in any house to photograph and it is not about darkness — it is about ceiling height and color. Low ceilings mean no distance to bounce light, and whatever the walls are painted, that color lands on everything. Shoot it carelessly and a nice finished basement looks like a basement.
Shooting a long room from the short end exaggerates the depth, which is the honest thing to do here because the depth is the point. You want a buyer to understand that both tables fit with room to walk around them.
TWO SETS OF EXTERIORS, AS ALWAYS
Three of the exterior frames from this shoot show the address plaque beside the front door clearly enough to read at full resolution. Those went to MLS, where the address is the entire point, and nowhere else.
The exterior in this gallery and in everything we posted is a three-quarter from the left where the plaque does not resolve. It was shot from about eight feet to the side of the ones that do.
We write about why we do that here. Short version: a listing comes down when the house sells and a social post does not, and the sellers are still living there the whole time it is up.
WHAT WAS DELIVERED
The Plus package — $300: 25 MLS-ready photos, six drone photos, a property walkthrough, a basic cinematic video and floor plans for all three levels.
Photos delivered within 24 hours, video within 48.
Shot in one afternoon. Listed by Barry Jilin, United Realty Group, Inc.
FAQ
How fast do you deliver photos and video?
Standard turnaround is 24 hours for photos and within 48 hours for video.
Does a bigger house cost more?
Not by square footage. A larger property usually needs more photos and more time on site, so it is quoted with that extra coverage included rather than at the base price. Send us the address and we will give you the number before anything is booked.
Is drone included?
Six aerial photos come with every package, including the $200 Base. It is not an upsell.
Can you shoot a house this size in one day?
Yes. 5,401 square feet over three floors with photos, drone, walkthrough and cinematic video was a single afternoon. The thing that slows a shoot down is clutter and unprepared rooms, not square footage.
Do you shoot in Lincolnshire and the North Shore?
Yes — Lincolnshire, Vernon Hills, Buffalo Grove, Deerfield, Northbrook and the rest of Chicagoland. We are based in Mount Prospect. Anything within about 45 minutes has no travel fee; past that there is a travel fee depending on how far.