How to sell your home faster with better photos

Unless you’ve been living in a hole for the past couple years, you are no doubt aware that we are in a major financial crisis. Unemployment is at its worst, consumer confidence is low, and things aren’t looking good for US auto makers. One of the worst-hit areas of the economy is real estate. Due to the problems with consumer credit and bank failures, banks are handing out a record low number of home loans. That means that fewer and fewer people are buying homes. What’s worse is that as more and more people become unemployed, they find themselves in a financial pickle and list their homes for sale in a panic.

These two problems have led to record numbers of homes listed for sale, and the majority of them just aren’t selling. If you have a house for sale, you will probably know this first hand. However, home sellers do have options available that will help them dump their property, and maybe even turn a profit, and it starts with the first things potential buyers see, your listing photos!

Taking great photos of your listing can dramatically improve the salability of your property. Here are some tips to follow when taking your photos:

1. Lighting – Always open the shades, turn on the lights and make sure that there is plenty of natural light available. Online and newspaper photos are bad enough, and are even worse when you can’t tell what the photo is because it’s too dark.
2. Cleanliness – Take a few minutes to put away those dirty dishes and piles of laundry. If you don’t take care of your space, people might assume you don’t take care of your house.
3. Landscaping – Don’t forget to mow the yard and trim the bushes before taking those lawn photos.

These are just a couple of the things you can do to help improve your photos. Of course, someone else may take the photos for you, or you might not have the ability to make some of the changes suggested above. Then what? Well you can always hire a photo retouching company to fix up your bad real estate photos. Some, like http://www.fixuppix.com will let you email them your photos and send you the results quickly so that you can post them online. Retouching companies can remove power lines, dead trees, fix shabby paint jobs, or pretty much any unsightly mess you want removed. They can even hide the neighbor’s boat that you just can’t seem to crop out.