When the Best Thing About a Listing Is Outside the Walls.

Some listings sell on the kitchen. This one sold on everything around it.

A second-floor coach home in Old Orchard Country Club Village, Mount Prospect. Three bedrooms, 1,672 square feet, vaulted ceilings in the living and dining rooms, a private three-season balcony over the trees. Clean, well kept, refreshed this year with new paint and new carpet.

It is also a 1990s coach home with oak cabinets and oak rails, and about ten rooms that photograph exactly as well as they should and no better. Pretending otherwise is how you end up with a gallery that overpromises and a buyer who feels it at the showing.

So the honest question on a shoot like this is not how do we make the rooms look like something they are not. It is what is actually the best thing here, and are we giving it enough of the gallery.

The Answer Was 400 Feet Up

Two golf courses next door. Walking paths to two ponds. A pool and a clubhouse. None of it is visible from inside the home, and all of it is what the buyer is actually paying for.

From the ground you cannot photograph any of that. From the air it is one frame.

We flew the Mavic 2 Pro, with the Hasselblad L1D-20c and a 28mm equivalent on a one-inch sensor, which is the difference between an aerial you can put at the top of a listing and one that looks like a phone held out a window. Nine finals. ISO 100 on every single one, f/4 to f/5.6, between 9:23 and 9:28 in the morning.

That is a five-minute window at the end of a ninety-minute shoot, and it produced the strongest images in the set.

The Interiors Came First for a Reason

We were on site at 7:27 and the drone did not go up until 9:23.

That ordering is not arbitrary. Interiors want soft, even light coming through the windows before the sun gets high enough to blow out one side of a room and leave the other in shadow. Aerials want the opposite, enough sun on the ground to separate fairway from rough and put some shape into the tree line.

Shoot them in the wrong order and you fight both.

One Week of Color

The first week of October in northern Illinois is the only week this particular listing looks like this from the air.

A week earlier the maples are still green and the course reads as a flat green field. A week later the big one at the front of the building has dropped and the aerial is a parking lot and a roof. We shot it on the fifth, and the trees over the fairways are gold.

Nobody schedules a listing around foliage. But when the calendar hands you that, you fly.

What We Left Out

Three of the strongest exterior frames in this set are not in the social gallery and never will be.

They are the ones where the house numbers above the garage read perfectly clearly at full size. Those belong on the MLS, where the address is the entire point. They do not belong on Instagram, where the post stays up long after the listing comes down and the sellers are still living there.

It cost about four minutes on the shoot to get clean alternates. It costs nothing on the invoice.

The Small Room That Did the Most Work

The best interior frame in the set is the three-season balcony.

It is not the biggest room, it is not staged, and there is nothing in it. What it has is a wall of screened windows looking straight out into trees that were, that week, entirely gold. Stand in it and you understand the whole proposition of the place. You get the view and somebody else mows it.

That is the frame we would put third in a gallery, not twentieth.

What Was Delivered

35 edited photographs, 26 interior and exterior and 9 drone, plus a floor plan with and without dimensions.

Shot on a Nikon Z6 for the stills and a DJI Mavic 2 Pro for the aerials.

Questions We Get

Do you shoot drone on every listing?

It is in all three of our packages, 6 drone photos minimum. On a property where the setting is the selling point, a golf course community, water, acreage, a view, we shoot more and give the aerials more of the gallery.

Do you need a Part 107 license to fly commercially?

Yes. Any drone work flown for a paying client in the US requires an FAA Part 107 certificate. Ask any photographer you are considering for theirs.

When is the best time of day for listing photos?

Interiors early, aerials later. Interiors want soft window light before the sun is high; aerials want enough sun to give the ground shape. On this shoot that meant interiors at 7:30 and the drone just after 9:00.

How fast is turnaround?

Photos within 24 hours, video within 48.

Do you shoot in Mount Prospect?

We are based in Mount Prospect. Also Arlington Heights, Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Schaumburg and the rest of Chicagoland.

See packages and get in touch at ogioptics.com/real-estate-services