You’ve got the professionals scheduled to take photos of your home, but what exactly should you do before they arrive? From staging your bedroom to overall tidying up, we thought we’d handpick some of the most important to-do’s, to make sure your home is ready when the photographer arrives. Get your pens ready for our real estate photography tips checklists!
The Exterior: From pulling weeds, trimming trees, and mowing the lawn, you want to be sure the exterior of your home is ready for lights, camera, action. HS Media, a professional real estate photography and videography company, explains “The front yard is the most important, but don’t neglect the back yard. It won’t look natural to have front yard photos of a beautifully manicured lawn and flower beds, with a back yard that is in disarray.” This checklist applies to your home as a whole, so be sure you are looking at all aspects of your exterior, front and back.
Real Estate Photography Tips Checklist for Your Outdoor Spaces:
- Mow the lawn
- Pull the weeds and tend garden beds
- Trim trees and/or hedges
- Clean outdoor seating and decorations (pillows, rugs, etc.)
- Put away your BBQ and its equipment
- Neatly stow away hoses, rakes, etc.
- Clean driveway, walkways, and patio/porch areas
- Make sure the pool is clean, all floats and noodles are put away, etc.
- Open your patio umbrellas, fluff your outdoor pillows. Stage the scene for a prospective buyer
- Check that all of your outdoor lighting is working
The Interior: Removing family photos, tidying up children’s toys in baskets or bins, tending to the pictures on the fridge, etc. Mark Singer Photography, offers real estate photography tips on how minimizing personal affects will really help when it comes to staging. They state, “Remove cordless phones, wired appliances, phone chargers, etc., from walls and counters.”
Real Estate Photography Tips Checklist for Your Indoor Spaces:
- Deep clean the home (hiring help might be the ticket)
- Stow away personal photos or belongings that you don’t want in public photos of your home
- Make the beds, fluff the pillows, stage each of your rooms
- Just like the bedrooms, make sure your living room, dining room, kitchen area are clean and don’t have extra items lying around. Stow away the extras in cabinets, cupboards, etc.
- Remember that less is more, if a room has too much clutter, remove and stow away extra decor
- Open the blinds and tidy up the curtains. Lighting is extremely important, so you want to be sure that you encourage all of your natural light to shine in the photos
- Remove anything obstructing the view of your windows, sliding glass doors, etc.
- Make sure all forms of lighting work, from ceiling lights to lamps on your nightstands.
- Remove extras from your bathrooms like soaps or shampoo bottles that don’t need to be in photos. Fold any decorative towels.
- Adjust your AC and make sure that your fans are off
Some of the check boxes in our real estate photography tips checklists may not be applicable to you and your specific home but we wanted to cover some of the most popular and overlooked aspects of photo day. Importantly, hiring professional help might be just what you need! When you work with our agents, they can put you in touch with highly rated cleaning services, lawn care teams, staging experts, and more. Have you met your IDEAL AGENT® yet?
