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My dad's got put on the market before Christmas and they ran the main outside shot of the front of the house through an AI to make it snowy, starry and to put Santa with his reindeer flying over it...

Estate agents are fucking insane mate.

I was having a nosey to see what's for sale near me at the weekend and had the exact same thought.

I couldn't tell the layout or proper dimensions of any of the rooms because of the way the photos are taken of this bit of the room and that bit but not the area in the middle.

And the random close ups of decor and fixtutes are wild!

When I lived in the UK, I was exasperated with the estate agents and their complete inability to take a decent set of photos and ended up taking some myself and asking them to use those.

I live in Denmark now and the difference in estate agent competence and their ability to take photos is unbelievable. An example of a house for sale in our town. Check the photos:

https://www.lokalbolig.dk/bolig/villa/taastrup/2630/marievej-5/30-X0003812?utm_campaign=boligsiden&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=boligsiden.dk

(Select 'billeder' for the photos)

If you enjoy looking at weird pictures from Estate Agents 😂

@semidetachedreality on Instagram!

But yes, they make some whacky choices and horrible wide angle lenses, making proportions feel and look strange.

I think there is some research that including animal pictures helps sales, at least in general marketing terms (unsure if this applies to estate agents??).

I'm fairly certain they'll come and redo them if you ask.

If you fancy sending us a link to the listing we'll probably all enjoy having a laff

Always frustrating because when you turn up to view it's always slightly disappointing that the rooms aren't as big as you've anticipated.

Because most of us live in shoeboxes. They’d be able to use standard lenses if we all lived in mansions.

We put a house in the market a while ago. Zero viewers in the first three weeks. My husband took photos and I re-worded the text for the brochure. Suddenly lots of interest and sold to the first viewer. Not sure what estate agents do for their money.

As bad as some of these?:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/20/terrible-real-estate-agents-photographs-excrement-horses-toilets-kitchen

I have a hardback coffee table book called 'Terrible Estate Agent Photos' and it's full of hilarious photos and funny captions.

One actually shows a room that looks like a bloody dead body had been dragged across the carpet and out through the door 😂

I’m looking for a small flat at the moment and it’s a nightmare. Bizarre zoomed in pictures of just parts of the rooms on all of them to avoid showing how small they are.

I’m aware it’s a small shitty flat, I’ve seen the price. Stop making me piece together every picture like a mind palace jigsaw and just show me what it looks like.

Redditor discovers wide angle lenses.

But in all honesty, it's kinda when they stopped using proper photographers and started sending out someone in the office with some basic camera gear to cut costs despite the fact they already make a huge wedge for doing very little.

Proper photographers can show most of a room without it being too distorted by using better judgement and in some cases by using shift lenses, it's all about getting that balance right.

It's a sad hobby of mine. Browsing Right Move in my area and looking for the awful photography.

Fisheye lense to make it look bigger

You mentioned a cat. Cat tax?

I suspect Estate Agency of being a huge con from front to back. I'm amazed at their behaviours and they are part of the problem of escalating property prices.

I mean, it's estate agents. The job you do if you're too useless to be a recruitment consultant, which is the job you do if you're too useless to have a proper job.

Property photographer here - I get the frustration. Some estate agents really favour extremely wide lenses, but to be fair some amount of distortion is to be expected regardless. A 16mm lens is generally considered the standard for internal photography in the UK. If you use a 16mm lens in a huge grand room you'll notice very little distortion, but in a smaller room the effect is much more noticeable. Basically, the closer an object is to the camera, and the closer it is to the edge of the frame, the more distorted it is. This is just optical physics and there's no way around it really.

The fact there's 98 photos with most of them being close ups are both kind of signs that it's a photographer without much experience, which is maybe why they've missed the mark with the composition of the room shots.

My place went on the market a few years back. Directly outside the house is a car parking space and I said that I'd be happy to move the car, if it would make for a better shot. That was sneered at and the estate agent said "oh no, my lens won't show that!" in a condescending tone.

The next day, the photos were live on the website. Not only was the car in the shot, but the bins that he'd promised to move were also highly visible, making the place look a right sh*t-hole. I phoned them up and asked them to come and take better photos. They said they'd have a look. Their response was to Google "bricks", copy and paste an area from the results and stick it over the top of my photo to obscure the bins. It looked even worse! The place now looked like it had severe structural damage. When I went in to see them about it, their response was: "Well, we've never had any complaints about that kind of thing before". I took my business elsewhere.

My parents house pictures made the chair in the hall look like a love seat and the double bed in the spare room look like a single 🤷‍♀️

98 pics - 5 close up =93 pics

2 per room you say

93÷2= you've got a lot of rooms.

It's all Insta now, isn't it. People want to be able to get a good sense of spaces, room sizes, not random photos of a vase, or yes, a cat.

People would have an easier time determining if a house is for them if sellers were forced to include square footage (or metre) in their sales brochure. For the whole house, but also for each room, hallway and staircase.

We were so relieved when we got our photos, they're actually really honest! Our estate agent uses a professional photographer and it makes a world of difference.

Always amuses me when you see oval clocks on the wall and oval washing maching doors. I mean, who the hell do they think they're kidding?

I saw one last week focusing heavily on the champagne bucket and tacky Chanel framed poster in the living room. Neither are for sale. They’re idiots. 

Sold my flat last year and when the guy came to take the pictures I mentioned the view was really nice when it’s sunny but unfortunately it was raining. They just photoshopped a nice view out the window of a random sunny landscape.

Perhaps they used a 360 camera and all the closeups were frames chosen by AI?

Pics of a table set for six, or a bowl of fruit…why?

I always take a photo of the cat/dog/pet slug, it's the most interesting part of the job. The close up detail shots are 'lifestyle' - selling the vibe not the house.

If you care about the pics, be proactive and hire a photographer direct. Find someone online whose portfolio you like and work with them to get decent photos and you'll be miles ahead. And if your agent is rubbish you can sack them and take those photos with you to a new agent because you're the client, not the EA.

[deleted]

I'm a professional photographer and regularly shoot interiors and homes for people and agencies.
It's amazing how many don't get what the purpose of the photography is for, to help sell the house.
I've re-shot entire £10 million + properties as the first set was soooo bad.

This is all that matters:
- Wide angle shots of every room taken from the corners at about chest height. But not so wide as to stretch the room.
- Never ever use a flash, use a tripod. If you don't understand how a slow shutter on a fixed mount delivers brighter and sharp images, sell your camera.
- Shoot what the floor plan shows, in truth the floor plan is the most useful tool to sell a house. If there's a knock through living room, show it both ways. If there's a box room study, show it. Cellar ? Show it.
- Lifestyle shots are for magazines. Don't focus on objects that won't be there when you hand the place over.
- Kitchen kitchen kitchen. Many people move to get a better and bigger kitchen.
- Ditto windows and ceiling height, people want to know scale and volume and the condition / style of the windows.

Oh and tidy the fucking place up, just put all your shit in a cupboard or behind my camera. There should be nothing visible that you bought in a supermarket other than fruit.

I run an estate agency and one of the rules we stick to is not to use fish eye lenses to take property pictures.

There's no point in lying to people about how the house looks, it's better to only have viewers who will be interested in the house when they see it.

Redditor discovers wide angle lenses.

It’s obvious why they use them, otherwise you’d need hundreds of photos to show a property. It’s not ideal but you’re limited by the constraints of a room to photograph and the genre not going to be bringing a bunch of different lenses to user for every possible room dimension.

Blame the estate agent. The photographer, if they sent a proper one rather than just cheaping out. Would do it properly, make sure the proportions are right, take it as a HDR to get the most out of the light. If they cheap out and just do an iPhone and then AI it, you're going to run into issues

I've been looking at cars recently, some dealers over use the wide angle lenses a little bit, or take pictures from weird angles, but one garage I found used the widest, most distorting lens they could possibly use, and every car had one of the front wheels up on a ramp. The cars looked so different from the cars they were supposed to be portraying, it was comical. I struggled to see how they could take a worse picture.

I find this ridiculous. Considering 360 cameras are so cheap these days and the viewers are easily integrated into websites there's no need for shit photos.

My next door neighbour sold hours house recently. Out of curiosity, I took a look at the listing for his house as it's the same as our house, just end of terrace and ours is mid terrace. The angles were really weird and made the bedrooms look tiny, like barely able to fit a single bed, and the kitchen look massive. The first photo also included our kitchen window with my huge cactus in it

I refused to let my EA take the photographs. I did my own. He looked horrified when I told him. But when I sent them, he agreed I'd done a better job than they could.

They often use ultra-wide angle lenses and then don’t bother to correct perspective and warping when editing the images (if any editing is done at all).

Wide angle lens is used to create the illusion of size.The photographer made every room in my mums house look massive when in reality they’re not. It meant a lot of viewers left disappointed expecting larger rooms but it did get a lot of people through the door and the house sold quickly.

Not sure what point I’m making. 😂

Wide angle lens it's so they can fit the entire room into the shot

Our estate agent just used his iPhone camera, mostly with the wide angle setting. The photos were fine, but I took a few myself and sent them in to use instead as some of his photos missed bits or were from weird angles making the room look like an igloo or something. Remember, the estate agent works for you. If you dont like their photos, don't use them.