In the highly competitive, fast-paced world of real estate, it is vital to stay ahead of the curb and ontinuously look for ways to improve your business. The days of yellow page listings and friend-of-a-friend realtors are over, the industry has gone digital, and you have to either keep up or run the risk of failure.

One of the surefire ways of improving your online presence is having aesthetically pleasing photos of every single property on your website. And developing your visual presence does more than just help with new customer acquisition. If done right, it can do wonders for your customer experience and hasten your sales process. Here’s how it works:

Emphasizing the strong points

Let’s be real for a second- unless you’re dealing with pristine, freshly-built houses in Vienna (the BEST place to live according to the Mercer’s Annual Quality of Living Ranking), there are going to be some problems with every piece of property out there. Moreover, unfortunately, not every seller is a trained photographer, able to capture the best parts of his realty and highlight the key selling points for it.

In this scenario, a picture really DOES say a thousand words.

At the other end of the scale, you have sellers who take lousy pictures of otherwise great spaces, dissuading the customer from giving the photo a second glance or actually taking the time to go for a viewing. So whether you’re selling an imperfect apartment or a spectacular 3-story mansion - optimised images matter.‍

‍Speed up the sales process

With so many property listings out there, people spend less time per-listing and make their minds up faster than ever. Whether your customer is a long-time house hunter or a first-time buyer, he’s bound to have a particular set of details that he’s looking for. Displaying these features as soon as possible becomes even more critical.

However, while many listings feature comprehensive details about their properties in text form (especially those in managed marketplaces), chances are, the customers are not reading them. According to neuroscientists at MIT, our brains are able to process an image in as little as 13 milliseconds. With the ever decreasing attention span of new generations, the importance of eye-catching photos is only going to increase.

This is especially important for property listings, as potential customers are most likely going to focus on images when making a decision. It’s up to you to assure that every single photo of a property is as impactful as possible.

According to PR Newswire, using professionally-optimised photos improves the speed of selling properties by up to 32%! And while this is great for the realtor, it’s also great for the end-consumers. It’s easier for them to make up their mind, spending less time looking for the perfect home. Optimised images bring both short-term value by making sales faster as well as long-term value by improving customer satisfaction.

Including a personal touch

Innovations in the field of real estate selling and renting have gone a long way in recent years and have made the process for realtors a lot more efficient. However, all of these changes have also made the process much more sterile and impersonal.

Companies like Opendoor.com are making the process of selling or buying a place almost seamless, but that does take away the experience of interacting with an actual human being. It’s almost like doing business with a computer rather than a person.

However, there are ways of making it more personal. Merely having a solid, professionally-taken photograph of the realtor in person has a fantastic effect on potential customers. Scrolling through the listing pictures and seeing a warm, friendly face yields a positive connection and can be an additional factor in making the sale happen. It makes the buying process more personalised and adds a layer of transparency & validity.

Conclusion

It takes creativity and inventiveness to remain competitive in real estate. Improving the visual content for every listing does wonders for potential clients. Whether it’s making average apartments stand out, bringing additional customer value by hastening the sales process or just introducing a friendly face into the sales equation - everything can be improved by having excellent photos.