Preparing your property for photography
This is very important, and it’s important to understand that the way you want to present a property for photos is not likely to be the way most people live day to day. So here are some tips for staging your home to look its very best in pictures:
1. Things: Unless you live a very minimalist life your possessions, which have utility for you in your daily living, will make your property marketing photos look too busy and cluttered. So tidy everything you can away. Since photos aren’t generally taken inside cupboards and storage spaces you can just shove it in there if needs be.
2. Cleanliness: Have a really, really good clean up before the photographer arrives. A freshly cleaned surface or window will be apparent in a photograph when compared to one that’s dull and dirty.
3. Furniture: The places you’ve put it for convenient use might or might not be the place it looks best in a picture. Be prepared to help your photographer move that heavy table or sofa in order to add space or balance to a photo.
4. Staging: A cleverly placed bowl of fresh fruit, throw or other item can add a splash of colour and interest and break up expanses of plain worksurface or bed.
5. Vehicles: Unless you really think they will enhance the photo (perhaps you have a Morgan Plus 8 parked out front of your country pile) move them from your frontage for the photographer’s visit. A clean uncluttered exterior is just as important as a clean uncluttered interior for the right impression, perhaps more so, as the exterior photo is often the first seen, and if it’s jammed up with shopping trolleys and rusting Transit vans then browsers are likely just to pass on by.
6. Garden: Cut that lawn, trim that bush and tidy up! Your photgrapher might be prepared to photoshop in some slightly bare patches in your lawn, but he’s unlikely to be prepared to airbrush away dog poo and Japanese knot weed, so once again you should attack your garden with gusto before the visit.