This Charming House Includes a Warm Radioactive Glow in Every Room!
March 28, 2015 9:23 AM   Subscribe

With interest rates at an all time low (and likely to increase later this year), the spring home selling season should see plenty of new real estate listings. Many of those listings will feature terrible real estate photos (which has been covered before). It's amazing how good photography can make the difference in selling a house in 8 days versus 8 months. But with the rise of photo apps comes the worst thing to happen to property listing photos: bad HDR real estate photography.
posted by jca (23 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
OH man I swear I saw one of those the other day looking at house listings. If I wanted to feel like I was living in Cloverfield I guess I would've leapt at it.
posted by winna at 9:31 AM on March 28, 2015


HDR real estate photography seems to jive nicely with all the realtors who DO NOT APPEAR TO KNOW YOU CAN TURN CAPS LOCK OFF. What I find most fascinating is that particular trend seems to be much more prevalent in the really high-end listings.
posted by obfuscation at 9:45 AM on March 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


This extreme-HDR-photographed house will be the perfect place to put your 60" TV with the 120 Hz motion filter enabled and wrong aspect ratio.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:46 AM on March 28, 2015 [14 favorites]


What's HDR?
posted by notyou at 9:56 AM on March 28, 2015


I doubt a lot of agents are sophisticated enough to use HDR. I suspect most of these just have the saturation cranked up really high.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:57 AM on March 28, 2015


Some of these don't look too bad, at least not on my screen--I'm more distracted by the plastic jungle gym you left in the picture on a $1.3 million house than by the sky being faintly glowy. But some of them, I don't know how any human being would look at them and think they were a good idea to post.
posted by Sequence at 9:58 AM on March 28, 2015


I doubt a lot of agents are sophisticated enough to use HDR.

The Camera app on iOS has a built-in HDR function, fully automatic, push the shutter once and done.

I don't think it's necessarily a very GOOD HDR function, but it's there. And I'm pretty sure some of these photos are the result of using it.
posted by hippybear at 10:05 AM on March 28, 2015


Yeah, that's HDR not over-saturation.

notyou: HDR. It can be a very useful technique if done right.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:12 AM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm not really convinced that good photography makes all that much difference in the sellability of a house. As long as you can see the layout of the place, I wouldn't care how artfully the shots are composed.

On the other hand, my current house was a totally uninhabitable disaster area when we bought it (and moved in anyway) so I'm probably not a typical buyer.
posted by octothorpe at 10:15 AM on March 28, 2015


I get the feeling that a lot of the hate on HDR has the markings of an insider-like hipster posture. In those real estate pics, I tend to think the use of HDR is probably more flattering than not, particularly the the interior shots. The sin being that they are HDR, not that they're particularly bad. These photos aren't made to satisfy the aesthetic senses of ate critics or Photoshop-savvy computer geeks, after all.

The outdoor shots can look a bit surreal, but I think a better case can be made that composition, rather than HDR, might be a better way to critique these photos. I mean, there's gotta be a way to show someone's back yard in a way that doesn't highlight a high voltage power line as its central feature.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:33 AM on March 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


octothorpe: "I'm not really convinced that good photography makes all that much difference in the sellability of a house. As long as you can see the layout of the place, I wouldn't care how artfully the shots are composed."

Maybe. But if you have all the lights on in a house and it still looks dark, that's depressing. In that "8 months to 8 days" article, they talk a good game, and while they give credit to the realtor, there's no mention of how that realtor might have played a role:

- They might have a better set of relationships with clients
- They clearly have better staging: in all of the before / after photos they changed the color and brightness of the lights. I'm guessing they went from incandescent to CF, and spent some of the wattage difference on brightness
- Seasonal changes matter -- They listed in July, which means they missed a good portion of the home buying season
- It was originally listed at 39 percent above previous purchase price, they had to lower their profit margins by 10 percent to move the house. Lowering the price is a really good way to sell things, turns out
- Economic conditions matter too. Credible threats by the Fed to raise interest rates are moving people on the fence about buying now vs later
- Seriously though staging. The old bedroom staging for example, had the drawers so close to the bed you couldn't walk past without bumping something. So they removed that stuff and the bedroom looks bigger consequently.

Also, holy shit, check out the Zillow listing's price history. That house sold for a million dollars in 2006. In 2009 it sold for an 80 percent discount from that. So someone got really screwed, and someone made out with a (smaller) of money.
posted by pwnguin at 10:35 AM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


Do not waver. This is HDR, and very bad HDR at that. Yes, it's hard to take a picture of a dark room with a bright window in the frame. Yes, using a higher dynamic range in the exposure and then compressing the tone curve down to screen presentation can help. No, doing it badly does not look good. Creepy dark skies and halos around the glowing cabinets do not make for good photographs.

Every time I see one a house with the light from the windows just as bright as the noontime sky outside, I thnk of the excellent painting Firelight Cottage. Cozy!
posted by Nelson at 11:05 AM on March 28, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm not really convinced that good photography makes all that much difference in the sellability of a house.

When there are thousands of houses on the market, it can make a difference. Just like staging. In a perfectly logical world, people would be able to ignore/see through bad photos and lack of staging to picture how the house would be for them, and it would make no difference. But this is not a perfect world. Advertising works, and good photography and staging are just part of advertising. If it gets even 10% more people through the door (and I'd be willing to bet it's a lot more than that), it can be worthwhile.

I like to think I'm a pretty logical buyer, but when I'm going through literally 100 or more listings to choose which to view over the weekend, the ones that look nice in the photos are likely to get a bit of a subconscious nudge up. It might be confirmation bias, but I've also found that there's some correlation between bad photos and poor maintenance, real estate agents who are flaky (and therefore making the buying process harder than it needs to be), etc. Basically it all goes to attention to detail, and in my experience it seems like the people who think photos don't matter are more likely to also think other details don't matter. Not even close to a 100% correlation, but some (and I've looked at a LOT of houses).

And yes, the over-done HDR is both annoying and ubiquitous. I know there are some professional real estate photographers in my area who specifically advertise to agents that they make these kinds of photos.
posted by primethyme at 11:17 AM on March 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


This reminds me of when I temped at an estate agent in a pretty awful neighbourhood. I was responsible for typing up their descriptions, and editing their photos.

It was like I was the deity of Photoshop when I showed them you could use Brighten/Contrast to make the grey British skies and dire former coal mining estates look marginally liveable.
posted by Katemonkey at 11:37 AM on March 28, 2015 [5 favorites]


Creepy dark skies and halos around the glowing cabinets do not make for good photographs.

The halos suggest that they didn't use HDR (which samples from multiple photos), but rather a "HDR-alike" algorithm that sampled from only one photo and used a crude, light-on-the-CPU large-radius sampling algorithm to adjust brightnesses.
posted by anemone of the state at 12:07 PM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm not really convinced that good photography makes all that much difference in the sellability of a house.

Given the price of a house and the cost of a set of basic professional photos, I would be surprised if hiring a pro was ever NOT worth it.
posted by snofoam at 12:15 PM on March 28, 2015


They clearly have better staging: in all of the before / after photos they changed the color and brightness of the lights. I'm guessing they went from incandescent to CF, and spent some of the wattage difference on brightness

Or maybe better photos and post-production (adjusting white balance specifically). I don't think it is obvious that the bulbs were changed.

One of the biggest differences is using a very wide angle lens, which creates an open, spacious look.
posted by snofoam at 12:18 PM on March 28, 2015


I wondered what that technique was, that I keep seeing in real estate listings.

I hate it, and it always makes me suspicious - like when they take a picture of the bathroom, but the bath tub or shower curtain is drawn shut.
posted by vitabellosi at 1:23 PM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


My childhood home went on the market again last year, and the realtor's web site had 100+ photos that were all seething, pulsing, overheated HDR. The expansions to the house were upsetting to my memories, but the color palates were upsetting to my sense of balance.

OK, possibly the last decorator had been a priest of Cthulhu The Color-Blind, but I am betting on just an overbearing contractor and a passive, overwhelmed homeowner.)
posted by wenestvedt at 3:58 PM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


I need to set up a site for bad rental photography. The current mood among landlords in Portland is that people will rent whatever dungeon they wish to list, photos be damned.
posted by elwoodwiles at 6:11 PM on March 28, 2015


A missed opportunity for the LITE AND BRITE tag.

So many listings have "Light and Bright" descriptions, it becomes all you can see when looking at properties.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 6:56 PM on March 28, 2015


The ALL CAPS things is baffling to me. I once did a website for an agent and brought that up, explaining how it made reading information more difficult and should be avoided. All she could say was "that's how it's done."
posted by davebush at 8:15 PM on March 28, 2015


In the current Sydney market, it is pretty common for a house to be listed with no photos at all, just a satellite image of the land with an outline around it, so that developers get an idea of what they have to work with. Everyone assumes you are only buying places to tear them down. When we go to showings, the real estate agents always do a double take when they realise we are not only planning to keep the house, but to live in it instead of rent it out.

But then a few times a week you get someone who thought they'd better include photos, but didn't get the memo on the fact that photos should give an idea of what the property is like. And then you get an image of a blank wall, one of a tree, and maybe one of the realtor's own feet.

There was also a place that sat on the market with those terrible sorts of photos (and no description or sale price, only the address and the owner's mobile number - clearly they didn't think they needed a realtor) for about two months, which is an eternity in this market. Then it disappeared, and has just returned with proper photos and a realtor's contact details. I'll be curious to see how quickly it sells now.
posted by lollusc at 12:41 AM on March 29, 2015


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