Why We Shoot Two Sets of Exteriors for Every Listing
There is a frame we throw out of almost every listing shoot, and it is usually the best one in the folder.
It is the hero exterior. Straight-on three-quarter, sun coming across the front, the whole elevation in frame. It is the photo that goes at the top of the listing. It is also, nine times out of ten, the photo where the brass address numbers beside the door read perfectly clearly.
That photo goes to MLS. It does not go on Instagram.
TWO AUDIENCES, TWO SETS OF RULES
MLS is a listing. The address is the entire point — a buyer’s agent is searching by it, the showing service is routing to it, the appraiser is pulling comps against it. A legible house number there is not a problem, it is the product.
Social is a broadcast. The post goes to a few thousand people, most of them nowhere near the house, a good number of them not in real estate at all. It gets shared. It sits on a grid for years. And unlike the listing, it does not come down when the house closes.
Put a readable street number in that post and you have published an address to strangers, indefinitely, for a family that is still living in the house while it is on the market. Add the location tag most agents put on property posts and you have not just published an address — you have published it twice, and made it searchable.
Nobody means to do this. It is just that the best-lit frame and the frame that shows the numbers are usually the same frame.
IT COSTS NOTHING TO SHOOT AROUND
This is the part worth knowing: avoiding it is free.
A few degrees of angle puts the entry column between the camera and the plaque. Stepping back and wider drops the numbers below the size where they resolve. A shrub, a porch post, a car in the neighbor’s driveway — anything in that sight line does the job. On a house we shot recently in Lincolnshire, three of the exterior frames had a legible plaque and two did not, and the two that did not were shot from eight feet to the left of the ones that did.
So we shoot both. Same house, same light, same trip. The MLS set gets the clean straight-on. The social set gets the angles where the number falls behind something. It adds maybe four minutes to a shoot.
What it does not mean is editing the numbers out afterward. Cloning an address off a brick wall is retouching a house, and once you are willing to alter what is actually on the building you have started down a road that ends somewhere you do not want to be with a listing photo. Shoot it right instead.
CHECK IT AT FULL RESOLUTION, NOT ON A CONTACT SHEET
The part that catches people is that you cannot clear a frame from a thumbnail.
At the size photos come back in a gallery, an address plaque is four grey pixels. It looks like a smudge on the brick. Open the same file at 100% and it reads clearly.
We have made this mistake, on one house, twice — once picking an establishing shot off a contact sheet that turned out to be the back of the property, and once clearing an exterior as “no numbers visible” that had them plainly readable when opened properly. A contact sheet finds candidates. It does not approve them.
THE OTHER THINGS THAT STAY OUT OF THE SOCIAL SET
Once you are thinking this way, the list gets a little longer, and none of it is hard.
License plates. Same problem as the house number, attached to a person instead of a building. The seller’s car, the neighbor’s, ours.
Mail, prescriptions and paperwork on counters. A name and address on an envelope on the kitchen island is a detail nobody notices in the room and everybody can read in a photo.
Photos of the family, especially kids. Framed pictures on a mantel, a fridge full of school portraits. Fine in a room, not fine broadcast.
People in the frame at all. A neighbor in their own yard, someone in a window, the seller walking through. Nobody in a listing photo consented to being in a marketing post. We shoot around them or wait.
The neighbor’s house number. Easy to miss entirely, because you are looking at the listing, not the house next door.
None of this applies to the MLS set. All of it applies to anything that gets posted.
WHY AN AGENT SHOULD CARE
Partly because it is the right way to treat a seller who is letting people photograph their house while they still live in it.
But practically: you are the one whose name is on the post. If a seller ever raises it, the answer you want is that it was handled before anyone asked, not that nobody had thought about it. It is a small thing that signals you run a careful operation, and sellers notice careful.
It is also a fair question to ask a photographer you are hiring. Most have never considered it, and the answer tells you a lot about how they work.
FAQ
Do you still deliver the straight-on exterior with the house number?
Yes. That is the MLS photo, and it is in every delivery. The two sets go out together — you decide what goes where.
How fast do you deliver photos and video?
Standard turnaround is 24 hours for photos and within 48 hours for video.
Can you remove a house number from a photo I already have?
We would rather reshoot the angle. Editing the address off a building is altering the property, and that is a different thing from color correction.
Do you serve my town?
Ogi Optics covers Chicagoland out of Mount Prospect — the northwest suburbs, the city, and into Wisconsin for the right project.