Part Six - The Master Bedroom

Welcome to part six of our twenty two part miniseries on real estate photography and the role that it plays in marketing a home.  Today we are going to look at a master bedroom from a local listing, taken with a point and shoot camera, and then critique it and compare it to a shot from my site, PG Listings.ca

I'm feeling rather saucy tonight, so I think I'll turn things up to eleven and choose a higher end master bedroom, something that you might walk around in wearing a silk kimono, puffing away on your ivory tusk hand carved pipe while doing morning pilates....So with the goal of evoking that kind of imagery, lets have a look.

I don't know about my faithful readers, but this home, which is slightly under $400,000, is underwhelming to me.  That price point will get you a pretty nice place in this town, so it is alarming to see this kind of image.  In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that this image makes me want to visit the house even less than if there were no images at all!  What we have here is a classic case of the camera trying to expose both the bright windows and the dark interior at the same time, but it's little wee sensor can't handle the range in brightness, so it tries to split the difference, resulting in blown out windows anyway (which can be nice in certain situations), and a dark room, which is never nice.

Fun Fact: Turning on the lamp will do wonders for both the overall light levels, and it will add warmth and character to a shot.  Visualize the shot above with the bedside lamp on for a moment - It seems much nicer doesn't it?

Anyway, here's a shot from a similar price bracket from PG Listings.ca

Booyah!  If you don't want to don slippers and do pirouettes in this baby then you aren't a pillow loving human! Total difference in asking price is about $15,000 (my shot is from the more expensive home) and the difference in perceived value - priceless.  Actually, it's not priceless, I'm sure there is a quantifiable figure that can be applied, but whatevs.  To make a shot like this requires some off camera flash units as well as knowledge of photoshop - because you'll need to do some touch up after the image is taken.  This takes time, which is one thing that an active real estate agent does not have a lot of.

An ancient and wise real estate agent once blogged that the effective realtor applies 10% of the total commission toward marketing the home, and when you look at the kinds of dramatic differences that can be manifested by using a competent real estate photographer, that's good return on investment (I'm not biased)

Well that's it for today, I hope you are enjoying our two part series on home real estate photography, and I look forward to your comments!  Now it's time to don that robe and slippers!

Daniel Abraham
PG Listings.ca