One Photograph to Sell a Home
The lead photograph can have an enormous effect on the saleability and indeed sale price of a property. It can be true to say that you have one photograph to sell a home. How good a house looks in the main shot is down to a number of factors and not just how good the house looks in the flesh. A pretty house helps but if it doesn’t get the sun (possible for some months of the year), tree cover prevents views of the house from the best viewpoint or obstructions such as garages hide part of the house the photographs can suffer.
We know just how important the main shot is and that’s why we’ll do everything we can to get the absolute best shot possible. Only last Thursday I carried the elevated mast through an ash tree and 10 metres of nine foot high ferns to get a good vantage point of this house. Even from this vantage point I need the mast at its full nine metres to see over the ferns and show its fantastic setting.
The property below is a fantastically hidden house right in the middle of York. Scouting the location before we discovered most of the beautiful façade was hidden behind overgrown shrubbery which was cut back before our visit and allowed us to capture the house in all its glory, likely adding thousands to the final sale price.
In the following example moving outside of the property perimeter yields an entirely different view of the property, placing it in its setting and showing the viewer great additional selling points such as a walled courtyard and gated entrance.
Our final example is one of the most difficult photographs I have ever shot. This remote mill in the North Yorkshire Moors was already beautiful. I only had to point my camera in its general direction to get a pleasing shot. But I knew it demanded more. After searching and searching for the perfect shot I was beginning to wonder if I really could tell its story in one picture. But I kept trying. Shots from a distance rendered the stream almost imperceptible which wasn’t okay, this was a mill after all. Closer shots showed the stream but not the property's own dell and the flow of the water. I wanted viewers to sense the babble of the stream that I was experiencing and the remoteness of the setting I appreciated on the drive up. Eventually I had it. The one shot that showed the property and all it had to offer. And the estate agent had numerous offers over the asking price.
