What to Do Before Your Listing Photographer Arrives

A listing shoot is an hour of work for us and about an hour of work for whoever gets there first. That second hour is the one that decides how the photos look.

None of what follows is staging. Nothing here costs money. It is the short list of things we see cost listings a good frame, in the order they cost the most.

Clear the counters. All of them.

Kitchen and bathroom, completely. Not tidied, cleared.

The toaster, the knife block, the soap bottle, the stack of mail, the phone charger. All of it off, into a drawer or a box in the garage.

A clear counter reads as more counter. Counter space is one of the few things a buyer is actually counting while they scroll, and every object sitting on it subtracts from the number they come away with.

This is also the single most common reason we end up moving things ourselves, which is fine, but it is time that comes out of the shoot.

Cars off the driveway.

Yours, the sellers’, and the neighbor’s if they will move it. Off the driveway and ideally off the street directly in front.

A driveway with a car on it photographs as a parking spot. Empty, the same driveway photographs as an approach to the house, which is what the first frame of a listing is supposed to do.

It is the easiest exterior improvement available and it costs nothing.

Every light on. Every bulb matching.

Lamps, overheads, under-cabinet, closet lights, the one over the stove, the one in the laundry. On, all of them, before we walk in.

Then check the color. One daylight bulb in a fixture of warm ones turns that corner of the room green, and a mixed fixture is one of the few problems that does not clean up neatly in post. Correcting the green pulls the warm light somewhere it should not go. Swapping a single bulb the day before is a two-minute job that saves a frame.

Blinds all the way up.

Not halfway. Not angled. All the way, every window, and at the same height as each other.

Half-open blinds cut a room horizontally and throw stripes across the floor and the furniture. Matching heights across a wall of windows is the difference between a room that looks composed and one that looks like nobody checked.

Beds made. Toilet lids down.

Every bed, including the kids’ rooms and the guest room nobody goes in. Lids down in every bathroom.

These two are on the list because they are what gets noticed in the finished gallery, by the seller, after we have gone. Neither can be fixed from a laptop.

Clear the yard, not just the house.

Bins back in the garage. Hose coiled. Toys, dog bowls and extension cords in. Grill cover straightened. Anything leaning against the house moved away from it.

The exterior is the first frame a buyer sees and it is almost always the frame with the most stuff still in it, because everyone spends their prep time indoors.

The hour before

If there is only time for a short version, it is this: counters cleared, cars gone, lights on, blinds up.

Those four take about twenty minutes between two people and they affect every single photo in the set. Everything else on this list affects one room.

What we handle

Worth saying what is not your job. Angles, lighting, vertical lines, color, the order the set is delivered in, keeping the address and anything identifying out of the frames that go to social. That is ours. We also carry a kit for the small stuff and we will move a chair or a bin without being asked.

The list above exists because it is the part only the person with keys can do, and because an hour of it is worth more to the finished gallery than anything we can do afterwards.

Questions We Get

How long does a listing shoot take?

Most homes take about an hour on site. Larger properties, twilight work or video add to that, and we will tell you up front.

When should the photos be taken?

As close to launch as the schedule allows, with one exception: exteriors. If a listing is going live in winter and the yard currently looks good, we shoot the outside now and hold the files.

What if the house is still occupied?

Normal, and most of this list is written for exactly that. The counters and the yard do most of the work. Nobody needs to move out.

How fast do you deliver?

Photos back in 24 hours. Video within 48.

See packages and book a shoot at ogioptics.com/real-estate-services