Image via Wikipedia
I was given a great home to sell a few weeks ago – here are the details, thanks for asking – and the first thing I did was to hire a professional photographer, Chris Corrie. Why? Because I am a good realtor but an average photographer. Chris surprised me by telling me he rarely gets hired by real estate people any more. Brokers tell him they ‘don’t need him’ because they have perfectly good cameras of their own. Hmmm…. That’s like saying to Michelangelo ‘we don’t need you on the Sistine Chapel gig because we have our own paint and brushes’. And of course, it shows. The MLS is full of badly lit, poorly focused pics taken by enthusiastic but also very amateur real estate people. Doors open, toilet seats up, dinner plates in evidence – you’ve seen the pictures. Why it frustrates me, apart from the issue of not giving the client the best possible marketing, is that we real estate professionals pitch ourselves as just that, professionals, and we rail against FSBO’s who ‘try to do it themselves’. They don’t have the skills, don’t understand what goes into a transaction, blah blah. Yet we’ll whip out our camera phone to save a couple of hundred dollars and deliver a sub-optimal job for our clients. Bizarre.
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