Photos. Hands down the number one thing people want to see in online real estate, that isn't a secret to the real estate industry. There are all sorts of statistics that say the amount of traffic a listing receives can be incrementally tied to the number of photos displayed. One interesting tidbit I recently found on Zillow was that the traffic wasn't that different to homes that had zero vs one photo. But when you even just went to two, the traffic doubled. All of a sudden people had a reason to click into the property. And with the increased views, the leads from that property also doubled.
So what is the next big thing to thing of when comes to photos? RESOLUTION.
I challenge each of you to look at one of your listings on an iPad, a device which has an amazing photo viewer. Zillow also recently changed our photo viewer on listings, to be more than half the size of the screen. Low res photos do not look good and can look very pixelated.
For agents that are investing in high resolution and professional photography, I think this can be a huge differention point on listing presentations for you, as online 'staging' of homes is so important these days.
To help submit the best photos possible, I asked our graphic artist to provide some guidelines:
- The short answer: bigger is always better. The image servers automatically create the various sizes on the website (and for devices) so if you upload the largest, most high quality photo, it will be downscaled appropriately. Downscaling ("shrinking") will preserve most detail, which is much more preferable than upscaling ("stretching" - this is what causes blurry/grainy photos).
- At the very mininum, 316x234 is a standard photo size. This is the photo size of the photo pulldown on the map & list and in the details pane on iPad. Zillow's photo viewer, as well as the iPad gallery, can support photo sizes of up to 800x500. Again, bigger is better.
- If you do any cropping or editing, it is important to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio. This will prevent letterboxing, which creates empty gutters around the photo.
- This also applies to the orientation of the photo. Landscape is preferred, as portrait photos create letterboxing:
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