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When it comes to marketing your property, nothing makes a bigger impact on the first impression than the visuals you use in your listing. Photos, videos, and even virtual tours can mean the different between finding a good tenant right away or having a vacant property for 1-2 months. Anikio offers professional photography and virtual tours, but whether you’re planning to shoot your own photos or use a professional, here are some things that will make sure you get the best results possible before you take off that lens cap:

Preparing Your Property

1. Fix/Patch – Good photos should last you through many tenants. Make sure that suite repairs, patches, and fixes are done. Just like you’re looking for a reliable tenant that will pay on time, tenants want reliable landlords that make repairs promptly. Photos of walls (or doors) with holes, cupboards missing doors, or half-completed renovations don’t give a good impression even if you are in the middle of repairing them.
2. Don’t Forget Outside – It’s always a good idea to have at least one exterior photo. Make sure the yard, deck, and porch are in good condition (grass cut, snow shoveled, garbage bins tucked away).
3. Replace Burned-Out Bulbs – Now that your place is patched and fixed, don’t forget to make sure that all your bulbs are installed and working. When you take a picture, what you’re really doing is capturing light from the scene. Less light, less great of a photo. And again, it speaks to how well the property is maintained. Try to keep all the same colour temperature (also called warmth) in one room. Daylight photographs best in rooms with windows.
4. Put Stuff Away – Loose items like vacuum cleaner hoses, rags, things left behind from the previous tenant, etc. should be neatly put away in their usual storage place. This will save you having professional photos shot only to find a dirty rag sitting on top of your washer/dryer.
5. Clean – Hopefully the suite was cleaned when the previous tenants left, but if they missed a few things (or you made some dust in the previous three steps) take the time to clean up floors, baseboards, etc. and make everything look its best. Again, it’s a bit of pain now for photos that can last many years.

Taking Photos

1. Lights! Get all the lights on, even the ones in adjacent rooms, on the porch, etc. Light makes your place feel more warm and welcoming but it also makes your photo results better. Cameras adjust to low light by a combination of leaving the shutter open longer or increasing the ISO. The longer the shutter is open, the more likely the image will be blurry from your hand shaking. This can be combatted by using a tripod. As for increasing the ISO, what this really means is a more grainy and less clear photo. The smaller the camera (for example if you’re using your phone) the less it is able to deal with low light.
2. Blinds! Open all the blinds. Again, you want to let in as much light as possible for your photo. This part can be a bit tricky, though. If you are shooting a scene with open blinds and the sun streaming in, the camera can think the picture is too bright and make everything dark inside so that the scene outside the window is exposed correctly. On most cameras you can adjust the exposure (for example, on an iPhone, click the light icon on the yellow box and drag up to brighten the image) so that the inside is exposed correctly. This may result in a very white/bright window. Optionally, try to shoot with your back to the window to use all that light to your advantage, or if you have a HDR-capable camera (and tripod!) you may be able to get several photos of the same scene at different exposures and put them together to better replicate the dynamic range (from darkest to brightest) that the human eye can resolve.
3. Camera! Modern phones have better and better cameras and AI all the time. These days, with enough light, you can get perfectly acceptable photos with a phone camera and occasional use of the panorama feature. However, nothing beats a nice big wide-angle lens on an SLR camera for collecting more light in the same scene. And don’t forget about a tripod for sharp, clear, low-noise photos in even dark rooms. As mentioned above, the tripod is also critical for shooting HDR photos that extend the range between the blackest black and whitest white to allow more of the image to shine through.
4. Action! Where possible, try to take your photos in landscape (wide) format instead of tall. This shows a more natural view of how people see the world and gives more of a sense of seeing a complete picture. Portrait (tall) photos are useful in small spaces but when used in large rooms, they can make it look like you’re trying to hide something. Photos look best on Anikio when they are cropped to a 16×9 widescreen format, but standard straight-out-of camera photos will work with no cropping also. If you know a bit about photography, you may also wish to do some post-processing of the photos, making sure the white balance is accurate, putting together your HDR photos and panoramas, and double-checking that the photos look as good and as accurate as possible.