"KP: Is it important for you that the photos actually originate from real estate marketplaces? If so, how do you verify their origin?
AD: Yes, that’s actually really important, otherwise the blog is just unverifiable user-generated content. If an image is submitted without a link, or no agent’s logo on the image, or I can’t find the source online, I tend not to use it. I’m sent lots of images taken by agents of something funny or shocking they’ve seen in a property that day, but if the image hasn’t been taken for the purposes of marketing the house, I don’t use it."
This is incredible given some of the listings. The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.
Nah, whoever chose that photo knew exactly what they were doing - they chose a photo that will appeal to their target market, which is people looking to get deal on buying a house that they will repair and flip for a profit.
The picture simultaneously shows that it is a nice, stately house, and also that it suffered significant damage which it needs to be repaired. It's the perfect choice.
There is zero chance that anyone in the market for a house in general would choose to buy this one, so there's no point in choosing a pretty picture which hides the damage. You'd just be wasting your time and that of your potential customers.
The worst ones aren't the funny ones where the homeowners have terrible taste, or the one on fire which was brilliant marketing for a home nobody was going to buy under the assumption it hadn't been on fire.
The worst ones are the subtly bad ones that just manage to make perfectly adequate rooms look much dingier or more cramped than they actually are because they settled for the first cheap snap they could manage without caring at all about the lack of lighting and didn't even move stuff like clothes drying racks that fill up floor area.
There's a particular flat I might actually consider buying that's on the market for a third less than the identical flat upstairs for over a year without selling. One of those listings has a "view" photo that shows extensive river estuary views on a sunny day. The other has the basically identical view on a day so wet and grey all you can see is the road and warehouse roofs.
Not exactly the same but close. There was a listing a couple blocks away from my current house. Nice brick colonial. Listing said "completely renovated". The exterior had been painted. In zillow, you can click a "see it in Street View which I did. The image was of a house gutted by a fire. I remember thinking "how could the listing agent not notice that?" and then "Perhaps there's nothing they can do in Zillow to turn off that feature". Well, the following week the Street View images had been updated. Which resulted in me wondering if there's a special Google hotline to request a driveby.
> The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.
Namely, honest people who aren't total shitbags always trying to put one over on their fellow human beings for profit.
When I see something like that I just assume the realtor knows they’ve been handed a dud listing and is expending as little effort on it as they possibly can.
With my parents we rented a house once in Italy. There were two ponies in the garden, they just walked all over the house whenever they wanted to. There was one in the kitchen most of the time. In the early-mid 80's people just accepted whatever (as my parents did, after driving 4000Km there and back with my dad chain smoking in the car and us kids in the back not wearing seat belts). The whole experience involved breaking at least half a dozen laws & regulations.
I like that they try to authenticate the photos as being from actual listings. Of course people could generate crazy photos. These are kind of just slightly bad, which makes it interesting. Also, I think the captions add a lot.
It sounds like they accept submissions, since they rarely put up photos that don't have links to the actual real estate listing the pictures comes from.
An acquaintance of mine is an FBI investigator and moonlights as a higher-grade Realtor.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.
It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.
I err to the side of incompetence, but want to believe it was a deep cover op to penetrate an enemy org by making them think he was compromised and had to act as a double agent, immediately rendering him a triple agent on behalf of the FBI...
The entire scenario is pretty unbelievable, and played out like an awful Adam Sandler movie. If I hadn't witnessed it with my own eyes, I would have trouble believing someone with dueling top credentials such as his could possibly be such an idiot.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
This really surprises me.
I would have assumed that an FBI memory card used for taking surveillance photos would have all kinds of security and encryption on it for chain-of-custody purposes. Otherwise, the photos won't stand up in court.
The healthcare company I work for has cameras it uses for photos, and for HIPAA reasons those cards are encrypted and secured. They won't even mount on an unauthorized computer.
Why would you say it wouldn't stand up in court? As long as the agent shows up to say, "Yes, I took these photos of real things that happened," that strikes me as the heart of the evidence.
I would have expected his job have guardrails in place to prevent this sort of mishap, like a full audit log and chain of custody of all evidence gathered during these investigations, as well as SOPs on the handling and storage of such evidence.
No, it's a very practical combination. Let's say you're investigating a murder, talking to the wife of the victim: "I'm sorry for your loss. Is there anything else you can tell us about what happened? And I can totally understand if you can't bear to live alone in this crime scene any more. In fact, if you want to move out, I know someone who would be interested."
That's how all photos should be - original, no editing, no staging; If I want excitment, I can Prompt a Generative-AI platform to create mind-bendingly-creative imagery.
I've wasted so many days viewing flats/apartments because the Photos looked amazing, and the actual property was utterly awful.
issues:
- narrow/steep Staircases
- very old photos (now the place a dump)
- fish-eye lenses (or similar) enlarging the space
- etc etc et bloody cetera :(
The second one is the fake bookshelves one (at least for me). I think that the house really has been lived in with that hideous wall.
But yes there are plenty of bad staging photos, and at least one totally ridiculous photoshop (the sofa planted completely out of perpective and in front of a mirror that ought to be reflecting it).
In my opinion, if anything, what makes these pictures less than ideal is the property itself which has nothing to do with the real estate agent. It's actually a net positive for potential buyers seeing all aspect of the object - what else should the agent do, hide unfortunate corners? Right, like anyone who actually cares to go and look at the property before buying it (so almost everyone) would not see these things anyway at inspection time.
What I am used to in the area I currently live in, is much, much worse - and actual incompetence on the side of the agent. And what's worse, you see it all the time! Here are a few highlights:
- A total of five pictures for the property, all of which are of the outside, none of the rooms.
- Blurry pictures as if someone first had to learn not to move the camera in the middle of taking a shot.
- Severely tilted pictures, as if taken on a boat.
- Three pictures of some door (the same door each time, mind you)
- ...
You might think this is a joke, and I wish it was. Unfortunately, though, this kind of thing is commonly found on real estate websites where I live. I don't know how anyone can ever get traction - I guess it must be a seller's market.
I'm not sure we're looking at the same photos... for some of them, sure, you're right. But many are bad photos like those you mention, except more egregious (hence they deserve the place on that site). The "garden" in one picture is rather awful, but why put that plastic chair facing against the wall to make it creepy on top of that? Why take a picture half naked (or not half - thankfully we'll never know) in front of a mirror? Why the cheap Christmas tree? Why those two sad soft toys in the corner of an empty room? Why a mower in the living room? Why include an old man watching TV in your photo?
As for the points you say, I'm not into real estate, I think often it comes down to limitations from reality. You know, actual _people_ live in those apartments you're trying to have pictures of. Maybe they'll just deny you entry (it's their place, after all, they might be renting and thus not give a damn about you willing to sell the property), in which case all you have to show is pictures from the outside. Or they might only agree to send you pictures themselves, in which case blurry pictures is all you get.
Of course, in general it's mostly incompetence, but hey, if everybody were perfect at their job the world would look totally different, in more important sectors than real estate...
When my sister bought her house, she felt like the current owners were actively trying to make it unappealing. Weird photos (not as bad as these, mind), staying home during open house, etc.
Turns out, the wife was trying to make it unappealing. She didn't want to move, but her husband did. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was the case in at least some of these photos.
> You might think this is a joke, and I wish it was. Unfortunately, though, this kind of thing is commonly found on real estate websites
The 2021 ad for our current rental had 1 interior picture. It was an old crayon drawing on wrinkled paper. The listing got 50 applications in the 2 hours it was up.
In that market, an ad that said nothing but 'Rental Available' would have been flooded with applications - every day.
It's less awful now. Many people have transitioned to homelessness and the rental market has eased up a little bit.
Yeah, or they just reuse the photos from a listing in the early 2000s, which is the lowest res camera phone picture. Seriously? just go to the property and snap a few pics with your phone.
When I moved to Seattle back in 2011 and was looking for a place to rent, I noticed that almost all the photos across multiple listings looked like they were paintings or architectural renderings or something. I could not figure out what was off about them.
A friend pointed out that the lighting was off because every single one was photoshopped with one of a few pictures of a sunny blue sky with just a few clouds in the background, despite likely having been taken on a grey, fully cloudy day.
FWIW: NWMLS will fine agents if the photos have been “too” doctored… adding some blue sky is generally considered ok, but anything that hides a material defect or camouflages the actual attributes of the house is a no no.
Does photoshopping furniture all over the flooring and walls count? I've seen plenty of that, seems standard actually since now you don't need to pay for staging.
Finally, somewhere to share my a list of dubious property listings! In Norway agents hire house stylists to make a house look good. Airbeds dressed up to look like somebody just got up, magazine pictures on the wall, etc... often to a farcical level in a rundown house.
I viscerally dislike McMansion Hell. It's so mean-spirited and snobbish. People build themselves homes in the suburbs for their families to live comfortably and safely, and some jerks on the internet act all superior about how they have better taste. It sucks.
Kate Wagner does a fanastic job of distilling the history and language and sensibilities of architecture down into something that anybody can appreciate.
And quite the opposite of snobbish, she presents her critiques in a raw, geeky, low-brow format that would probably feel at home on 4chan or SomethingAwful.
She is not knocking down regular suburban homes and families -- she critiques the top few percent who live in ostentatiously monstrous homes.
If the design goals for the houses presented on McMansion Hell were simply that - comfort and safety - I'd have to agree with your assessment. But houses appear there because they seemingly have one over-arching design goal which is to appear impressive and thereby signal the owner's wealth. Most of the content points to the sheer purposelessness of certain architectural features, highlighting the owner's need for recognition over utility.
> ... or their families to live comfortably and safely, ...
Well, it is safe-ish, in that street crime is usually not too high.
But living in car-centric suburbs, with a lack of common, public spaces and physical and social isolation isn't really comfortable, or that good for your mental and emotional health.
The parts that make them bad are mostly about trying to make the houses look (even) bigger than they are, and making them look fancier than they are as cheaply as possible.
That kind of inept, absurd pretension is a recipe for comedy.
I love McMansion Hell. It’s hilarious and I’ve learned from it. People with atrocious taste and enough money to impose it on the world should be exposed to ridicule.
It's a lot of work to visit a house you might want to buy, but there's about 0 percent chance you buy one without doing so. So the agent must optimize to get you there, essentially by lying with photographs.
This sets wrong expectations, and it's always disappointing to visit because it's never what the photos told you.
You get used to it as a buyer, but setting you up with wrong expectations isn't really what the buyer or seller wants.
Some of these aren't really bad photos, they're just a hard thing to sell. And some others are bad only because they're too honest.
Many are just bad of course. But the fire one is brilliant.
This site is impossible to visit on my setup. Firefox 114, default tracking protection, uBlock origin with default settings.
I am not interested in spending time debugging it, and I can live without seeing those photos.
Better spend that time whining here, where I suppose the ratio of web developers is high: what happened to web development? How come is it so complicated to write a site that displays some photos without falling apart at the first not-totally-mainstream user agent?
Readit News
"KP: Is it important for you that the photos actually originate from real estate marketplaces? If so, how do you verify their origin?
AD: Yes, that’s actually really important, otherwise the blog is just unverifiable user-generated content. If an image is submitted without a link, or no agent’s logo on the image, or I can’t find the source online, I tend not to use it. I’m sent lots of images taken by agents of something funny or shocking they’ve seen in a property that day, but if the image hasn’t been taken for the purposes of marketing the house, I don’t use it."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64389615
I suppose leading with a picture of it actually on fire is better than a post or pre fire photo.
The picture simultaneously shows that it is a nice, stately house, and also that it suffered significant damage which it needs to be repaired. It's the perfect choice.
There is zero chance that anyone in the market for a house in general would choose to buy this one, so there's no point in choosing a pretty picture which hides the damage. You'd just be wasting your time and that of your potential customers.
The worst ones are the subtly bad ones that just manage to make perfectly adequate rooms look much dingier or more cramped than they actually are because they settled for the first cheap snap they could manage without caring at all about the lack of lighting and didn't even move stuff like clothes drying racks that fill up floor area.
There's a particular flat I might actually consider buying that's on the market for a third less than the identical flat upstairs for over a year without selling. One of those listings has a "view" photo that shows extensive river estuary views on a sunny day. The other has the basically identical view on a day so wet and grey all you can see is the road and warehouse roofs.
Yes, for example, people who think it's a bad idea to show a picture of that house on fire.
You can't hide the fact it's burned before. It would be illegal. Making it clear so the potential clients think it's cheap is your best chance.
For anyone else who wanted to see that one specifically.
Namely, honest people who aren't total shitbags always trying to put one over on their fellow human beings for profit.
Dead Comment
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.
It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.
Maybe I can moonlight as a writer in Hollywood
Clip: https://youtu.be/8Inf1Yz_fgk
This really surprises me.
I would have assumed that an FBI memory card used for taking surveillance photos would have all kinds of security and encryption on it for chain-of-custody purposes. Otherwise, the photos won't stand up in court.
The healthcare company I work for has cameras it uses for photos, and for HIPAA reasons those cards are encrypted and secured. They won't even mount on an unauthorized computer.
I really, really, really tried my best, but the only appropriate i could think of was "Fucking hell!".
Are you sure they're not a realtor masquerading as a....well, at this point, who gives a shit?
I've wasted so many days viewing flats/apartments because the Photos looked amazing, and the actual property was utterly awful.
issues: - narrow/steep Staircases - very old photos (now the place a dump) - fish-eye lenses (or similar) enlarging the space - etc etc et bloody cetera :(
nice post
The second entry at the moment is an example of really bad staging.
But yes there are plenty of bad staging photos, and at least one totally ridiculous photoshop (the sofa planted completely out of perpective and in front of a mirror that ought to be reflecting it).
What focal length would you like the photos to be taken at?
What I am used to in the area I currently live in, is much, much worse - and actual incompetence on the side of the agent. And what's worse, you see it all the time! Here are a few highlights:
- A total of five pictures for the property, all of which are of the outside, none of the rooms.
- Blurry pictures as if someone first had to learn not to move the camera in the middle of taking a shot.
- Severely tilted pictures, as if taken on a boat.
- Three pictures of some door (the same door each time, mind you)
- ...
You might think this is a joke, and I wish it was. Unfortunately, though, this kind of thing is commonly found on real estate websites where I live. I don't know how anyone can ever get traction - I guess it must be a seller's market.
As for the points you say, I'm not into real estate, I think often it comes down to limitations from reality. You know, actual _people_ live in those apartments you're trying to have pictures of. Maybe they'll just deny you entry (it's their place, after all, they might be renting and thus not give a damn about you willing to sell the property), in which case all you have to show is pictures from the outside. Or they might only agree to send you pictures themselves, in which case blurry pictures is all you get.
Of course, in general it's mostly incompetence, but hey, if everybody were perfect at their job the world would look totally different, in more important sectors than real estate...
Turns out, the wife was trying to make it unappealing. She didn't want to move, but her husband did. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was the case in at least some of these photos.
This was mostly just bad houses. In some cases, the photographer seemed to do a decent job of making the best of it.
The 2021 ad for our current rental had 1 interior picture. It was an old crayon drawing on wrinkled paper. The listing got 50 applications in the 2 hours it was up.
In that market, an ad that said nothing but 'Rental Available' would have been flooded with applications - every day.
It's less awful now. Many people have transitioned to homelessness and the rental market has eased up a little bit.
Well that's a sad state of affairs.
A friend pointed out that the lighting was off because every single one was photoshopped with one of a few pictures of a sunny blue sky with just a few clouds in the background, despite likely having been taken on a grey, fully cloudy day.
On a similar theme is Zillow Gone Wild https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild and McMansion Hell https://mcmansionhell.com/
Kate Wagner does a fanastic job of distilling the history and language and sensibilities of architecture down into something that anybody can appreciate.
And quite the opposite of snobbish, she presents her critiques in a raw, geeky, low-brow format that would probably feel at home on 4chan or SomethingAwful.
She is not knocking down regular suburban homes and families -- she critiques the top few percent who live in ostentatiously monstrous homes.
Kate is a treasure and her site is a pleasure.
If the design goals for the houses presented on McMansion Hell were simply that - comfort and safety - I'd have to agree with your assessment. But houses appear there because they seemingly have one over-arching design goal which is to appear impressive and thereby signal the owner's wealth. Most of the content points to the sheer purposelessness of certain architectural features, highlighting the owner's need for recognition over utility.
Well, it is safe-ish, in that street crime is usually not too high.
But living in car-centric suburbs, with a lack of common, public spaces and physical and social isolation isn't really comfortable, or that good for your mental and emotional health.
That kind of inept, absurd pretension is a recipe for comedy.
Deleted Comment
Keep working on those art house photos, Sandra. But maybe keep them out of the listings, hmm?
It's a lot of work to visit a house you might want to buy, but there's about 0 percent chance you buy one without doing so. So the agent must optimize to get you there, essentially by lying with photographs.
This sets wrong expectations, and it's always disappointing to visit because it's never what the photos told you.
You get used to it as a buyer, but setting you up with wrong expectations isn't really what the buyer or seller wants.
Some of these aren't really bad photos, they're just a hard thing to sell. And some others are bad only because they're too honest.
Many are just bad of course. But the fire one is brilliant.
I am not interested in spending time debugging it, and I can live without seeing those photos.
Better spend that time whining here, where I suppose the ratio of web developers is high: what happened to web development? How come is it so complicated to write a site that displays some photos without falling apart at the first not-totally-mainstream user agent?
Just wow.
I never really used Tumblr, I just know it's the site Yahoo bought many years ago instead of Netflix.
The website in this submission is probably just a low technical effort site. This would explain its flaws.
I even tried edge and it doesn't work.