Guides / Selling
What estate agents wish sellers did before the photos
Agents are diplomatic people. Here's what they'd say if being blunt didn't cost them the instruction.
5 min read
Portal photographs are the entire top of your sales funnel. Nobody views a property they scrolled past. Yet most shoots happen in a property that's had two hours of tidying and no preparation at all.
The list
- Repaint anything scuffed. Cameras exaggerate marks, not hide them.
- Clear every surface. Kitchen worktops especially — one kettle, nothing else.
- Take down personal photographs and children's artwork.
- Clean the windows. It changes the light in every interior shot.
- Cut the lawn and sweep the front. The first and last photo are usually exterior.
- Move the cars off the drive and the bins out of shot.
- Open every blind and curtain fully, and turn on every lamp.
- Fix the small stuff — a cracked tile or missing handle appears in the photo forever.
The two mistakes that cost the most
Shooting on a grey day in winter, and shooting before the work is done and 'updating the photos later'. Updated photographs never get the audience the original launch had.
Agents will re-shoot for you. They can't get you a second launch week.
The sequence that works
Work finishes. Deep clean the next day. Photographs the day after that, in the morning if the property faces east and the afternoon if it faces west. Listing goes live Thursday, so the first weekend is the launch weekend.
The Presentable way
We do all of the above as one job: painting, small repairs, carpets, garden tidy and a deep clean, for one fixed price, finished in less than two weeks.