How to Take Better Photos of Rental Properties
The photos in your rental property's listing can make or break the quality of the tenant you place.
Poor photography will severely limit the number of interested prospective tenants, leading to a longer vacancy or settling for a tenant with higher risk. Using stellar pictures will almost guarantee you get more applicants than you can handle allowing you to pick the most qualified and least risky tenant available.
After all, rental property investing is a business and if you want your business to run like a well-oiled machine you need to reduce your risk as much as possible and try and deal with the highest quality tenants as much as you can.
Tips for Improving Your Rental Property Photography
1. Take More Photos
Prospective tenants want to know as much as they can before they invest time into viewing or applying for your rental.
If you don't have photos of every room and don't answer the questions tenants may be asking themselves they might just not apply. The fix for this is easy though. Just take more photos and make sure you cover every angle giving the tenants all the information they are looking for so they can confidently move forward in the application process.
One photo per room is not enough.
2. Lighting
Photography is 90% about lighting and that applies to photos of your rental property.
Use as much natural lighting as you can and make sure to turn on the lights in your property both when taking pictures and showing the unit to tenants.
Be careful not to use too much direct sunlight though, given it can have an effect that washes out your pictures.
3. Composition
The composition of a photograph refers to what is included and how visual elements are balanced and arranged.
It can be helpful to turn on the gridlines feature on your camera to try your best at focusing and balancing the visual elements of each room.
The composition in your photography can make or break the result of your pictures no matter the quality of your camera. But composition itself is truly an art and a topic that deserves its own article. It's worth learning more about composition if you want to take the best photos possible for your rental property.
4. Cleaning and Preparation
It hopefully goes without saying that the space you are photographing should be clean and free of clutter.
It's less appealing to want to move into a space if it looks messy and dirty. Spend the time or get help cleaning the space as best you can before investing in good photography.
You could have the best camera, best lighting, and most amazing composition but because the space itself is dirty and unappealing, get zero interest from potential tenants.
5. Using Wide Angles
This is a controversial point given a lot of landlords use wide angles to make spaces seem bigger than they really are.
Though this might result in more interest, the real reason for using wider shots is to better set the scene and give the viewer more context in each picture. It goes in line with the point about taking more pictures as our goal is to give viewers as much information as we can about our unit. We want to visually answer as many questions as we can that they might be asking themselves.
The more context we give potential tenants, the more confident they are in their decision to want to live in your unit, and the more applications we will get to fill our vacancy.
Closing Words
When potential tenants see your unit online all they get is a short description and a list of pictures.
Our goal is to convince them through these pictures that this is the best possible home for them to live in. We do that by taking amazing pictures that convey the most amount of information.
Poor photography doesn't answer all the questions they are wondering about and causes prospects to look at other opportunities with better photographs that answer more questions.
Again, this is a business where we want to work with the best tenants possible who expose us to the least amount of risk.
Photography is how we set ourselves up to do that.