How Great Photos Can Make Your Rental Property Appealing

If you have a rental property in Grand Rapids or the West Michigan area, then chances are you want to attract the best possible tenants you can find. There is no doubt that the best way to accomplish this is to use amazing photos online. Prospective tenants are searching the web first and there are a lot of rentals to choose from. If you want to draw a crowd of people to try and rent your home then professional photos will definitely help.

This might vary across different markets, but what we are typically seeing in recent years is that a lot of sales agents are using a professional photographer to capture a home, which makes a lot of sense. However, many of rental agents still seem to be living in 2003 and are taking their own (often terrible) photos, hoping the photos will be good enough to attract an influx of tenants willing to pay a top monthly dollar rate to live in that property.

Sorry rental agents, but things don’t work that way.

When poor photos are used this typically reduces the number of inquiries. As a result, you have fewer interested parties contacting the agent, which can eventually place downward pressure on the monthly rental price. If you think about it, renters are not really any different to home buyers. They still want to see what the property looks like before visiting and they are drawn to spaces that look amazing.

How Do You Take Great Photos Of A Rental Property?

Simply pressing the shutter button on your phone or camera might seem easy enough, but capturing great photos is harder than it looks.

For example, if you are looking directly at a window, then often the window will be excessively bright. Or the interior will go quite dark depending on what you focus on. Although some phones are quite clever, even if they can somewhat balance the outdoor and indoor exposure, many times you will get strange colors in the scene that detract from the overall presentation of the space.

Another issue that you can face is the color being cast by the lights in a room. Many times the light bulbs will be different colors in a room because a different style bulb has been replaced in the light fixture. For example, tungsten lighting can make a room look very orange, and other lights can make a room seem rather blue or green, and quite different to how it actually looks.

How Can A Professional Photographer Help?

A professional photographer has the skills and the gear to overcome poor lighting, ensuring every room looks its best. Now be careful, because you don’t want your photographer to create a false expectation of the space. The goal of a professional photo is to create a realistic view of a room that will attract the kind of tenant that is looking for a home with certain features and styles in mind. An experienced real estate photographer will do just that.

Consider Virtual Furniture For Rental Properties

Another way that your professional real estate photographer can help is they can shoot the room with no furniture, or even poor quality furniture, and digitally insert virtual furniture afterwards.

This is a great way to hide the private possessions of current tenants, or replace their ugly furniture. You can also use this to show the amount of furniture that can fit in a space if you shoot the home when it’s empty. A lot of people might find it difficult to imagine what could fit in an empty space. You can fix this by adding appropriate furniture virtually to a room at a fraction of the cost of hiring real furniture staging (and the heavy lifting that goes with that!).

You don’t even need to use virtual staging in all of the rooms. Some agents will use virtual furniture in just one photo, which they use as their hero shoot. This helps attract potential renters, increasing the likelihood that they will click through the rest of the photos.

Think About Your Future Landlords

When a rental agent uploads the photos for a new rental property, they might like to think about the message those photos give about that agent.

What are those photos saying to future landlords about the level of professionalism shown by that agent?

Do those photos give the impression that the agent handling that rental cares about their listings to the point that they will do all that they can to present them in the best possible way? Or do they suggest the opposite?

Instead of seeking the cheapest possible way to get a property listed online, rental agents and property managers need to take a step back and look at the whole scene. They need to consider how those photos impact the business as a whole. When they do that I think they’ll find that hiring a professional real estate photographer to shoot a rental property makes a lot of sense.