A friend recently emailed me a link to this blog, which is a hilarious collection of real estate photos gone bad. What blows my mind is just how expensive some of these homes are…yes, half a million for places that look like they should be condemned! I know we’ve been lucky to live in places where we could get nice homes for less than $150k, but I am not sure I realized just HOW lucky we’ve been. Actually, this is the first place we’ve spent more than $110k on a house…we’ve even had 2 (very nice houses) that we bought for less than $100k. It just blows my mind sometimes.
Anyway, it prompted me to go looking for bad real estate photos for Sanford and I DID find them. I was actually going to post some, but I’m really trying not to be too snarky here or alienate anyone. I did find out that the house next door to us is listed for well over $200k. Really??? Maybe property values in this neighborhood are better than I thought!
And as an aside, if you’re a local Realtor and are having trouble getting good photos, (and by good, I mean *in focus* and attractive angles!) would you consider hiring me on a trial basis to see if we can get some good photos for you? I’m also willing to do websites for real estate agents. In fact, I may set up a sample site over the next few days…I was kind of shocked when I realized that most of the local Realtors didn’t even have their own sites, at least not that I could find. These can be a great source of info, especially if you have your website printed on your signs. I often drive by houses and wish there was an easy way to get info about them!
Emily
July 23, 2008 at 9:35 pm
A lot of realtors around here do NOT understand that pictures and virtual tours SELL HOUSES. If you look at who sells houses the quickest around here you will find that they are the realtors that have virtual tours.
themama
July 23, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I think they’re just resistant to change…they think this is not Cary or Apex or whatever and think that houses will just sell themselves. In this market, it won’t work. I can’t imagine working as a Realtor and not having anything more than a very out of focus exterior picture to look at! You have to give me more, especially for a more expensive house. I’m not even going to bother to look at the house if I don’t get more than that in a listing. Virtual tours I can do without, but it’s absolutely ESSENTIAL to have good pictures available. Maybe I’m biased because we’ve bought and sold in WAY more competitive markets than Sanford but it just seems like such a basic thing.