Why professional real estate photography is essential

"Without an eye-catching photo, the battle is lost before it begins", says Michael Seiler, founder and director of the Institute for Behavioral and Experimental Real Estate at Old Dominion University at Norfolk, Va.

In his Wall Street Journal Article, Prof. Seiler cites research conducted on the eye movement of home buyers (and renters) looking for properties online.

These potential home buyers (renters) look at the main property image (if it's a good one) for 20 seconds or more, then look for property details such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage and price.

It was with research like this in mind that we created the property pages layout for Barbados Property Search as can be seen below.

Imagery is absolutely critical to enticing the buyer into looking at the further details of the property listing and has a direct effect on the liklihood they will enquire about the property. Listings with no photos at all are always the least viewed listings on the site, furthermore the quality of the photographs taken directly influences the liklihood of lead - this becomes even more important on vacation listings and high-end real estate sales.

To further show the effectiveness of proper photography, we've assembled some comparative photos below, taken at the same property in Barbados, to illustrate the impact that professional photography can have for your property listing.

For those realtors seeking to take advantage of the research, our affiliated company VT Caribbean can offer professional real estate photography and video.

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Professional photos courtesy of VT Caribbean.

A final telling statistic? On Barbados Property Search, listings with photographs, on average, get just over 4x the number of views (4.06x to be exact) - that's potentially 400% more views due to the use of quality photography!