Terrible real estate agent photographs
terriblerealestateagentphotos.com
terriblerealestateagentphotos.com
"KP: Is it important for you that the photos actually originate from real estate marketplaces? If so, how do you verify their origin?
AD: Yes, that’s actually really important, otherwise the blog is just unverifiable user-generated content. If an image is submitted without a link, or no agent’s logo on the image, or I can’t find the source online, I tend not to use it. I’m sent lots of images taken by agents of something funny or shocking they’ve seen in a property that day, but if the image hasn’t been taken for the purposes of marketing the house, I don’t use it."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64389615
I suppose leading with a picture of it actually on fire is better than a post or pre fire photo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFwS_Dqd-IU
(Scene from Synecdoche, New York.)
I do like imagining trying to sell it during the fire based on apparent damage done and the perceived capabilities of the fire dept. in stopping it.
You'd have to bulldoze that flat and start from scratch.
Except this part:
> because it's cheaper to buy a new one.
is not true. A write-off is because the repairs exceed the fair market value of the thing being written off. But the thing is used, not new. The fair market value is likely to be well below the cost of replacing it with something new.
No, it just means insurers are assholes rigging the game.
A simple example: my personal MacBook broke. MacBooks are written off in 5 years. My insurer only wants to pay the surplus value (€200).
I tell them okay, instead of the €200 find me a replacement MacBook of the same model and year with approximately the same config. “Sorry sir we don’t do that.”
Okay, do they think I can find the same MacBook for €200? “Probably not sir..”
Fuck insurers.
Here's the thing about getting a house loan: If you try to buy a house for too far under or over market value and can't explain why it's that far under market value, it sets off all sorts of red flags for lenders. Before we bought that house we passed on another because it was a unicorn in its neighborhood and our agent was having a terrible time coming up with documentation of comparable listings in a reasonable distance from the house. And then I discovered water damage and we bailed.
If you buy it for 15% under market and have a bunch of inspections that say why, that's less of a problem.
Insurance policies have some queer rules that all insurers share - perhaps due to building code, or maybe due to a common reinsurer?
Your floor cannot have more than 50mm (two inches) drop between two corners of the house, as it can’t be insured. Unless you can show the unlevel floor existed pre-earthquake, in which case you can get insurance! Wierd.
Now, there are laws against misrepresentation. There is a disclosure form that is required which asks you about defects. The seller can admit them or decline to answer, but if the seller knowingly lies about a property defect you can sue to recover damages.
Real estate agents have a lot of liability here because they are bound to disclose things that could have been “reasonably known” - which is a definition that can be tortured in every direction. For example, bedrooms: in my state a bedroom must have a closet to count as a bedroom. Except sometimes it doesn’t have to have a closet to count as a bedroom. The exceptions are literally described as “some older homes had bedrooms without closets” - but “older” and “bedrooms” is left to the interpretation of your legal council and the investigator when it becomes an issue.
Why is the BBC clarifying what country Manchester is in but omitting where Tennessee is? Very strange for a British publication.
American lifestyle is so wasteful. It’s disgusting. Climate change is impacting everyone and these rich assholes continue to waste resources on shit like this.
HGTV, eat your heart out.
If you're in the business of making content and advertising yourself... I could see how buying a burnt mansion would be compelling.
At the end of the day, my perspective is that builders like decreasing risk.
Anything saved after a fire is a risk. What's still structurally sound? If so, what are its new limits?
Custom = time and money. And everything in a post-catastrophic damage rebuild is custom.
Sure you can do it, but it might be cheaper (from a total cost perspective) to demolish and rebuild from scratch.
Namely, honest people who aren't total shitbags always trying to put one over on their fellow human beings for profit.
For anyone else who wanted to see that one specifically.
The picture simultaneously shows that it is a nice, stately house, and also that it suffered significant damage which it needs to be repaired. It's the perfect choice.
There is zero chance that anyone in the market for a house in general would choose to buy this one, so there's no point in choosing a pretty picture which hides the damage. You'd just be wasting your time and that of your potential customers.
In both cases, the marketing was correct. It's sorta a miss for the article author to not understand that.
Yes, for example, people who think it's a bad idea to show a picture of that house on fire.
You can't hide the fact it's burned before. It would be illegal. Making it clear so the potential clients think it's cheap is your best chance.
The worst ones are the subtly bad ones that just manage to make perfectly adequate rooms look much dingier or more cramped than they actually are because they settled for the first cheap snap they could manage without caring at all about the lack of lighting and didn't even move stuff like clothes drying racks that fill up floor area.
There's a particular flat I might actually consider buying that's on the market for a third less than the identical flat upstairs for over a year without selling. One of those listings has a "view" photo that shows extensive river estuary views on a sunny day. The other has the basically identical view on a day so wet and grey all you can see is the road and warehouse roofs.
He would use the same memory card and high end camera both during "stakeouts" for surveillance photos as well as listing photos for the homes he was selling.
One day he uploaded the entire contents of the memory card to the MLS on one of his public listings, surveillance photos and all. I'm pretty sure everything was up for a few days before being cleaned up.
It's been years but I still haven't made up my mind on whether that makes him a worse agent of law enforcement or real estate.
My shared connection to the Realtor dope I wrote about originally is someone I'm quite close to, and through them I've learned some pretty alarming realities of law enforcement.
It seems like the higher up the chain you look, the more indifference or incompetence you find.
Well, let's say, you have a really competent investigator. Is that the person you want to be promoted into a position where they are not doing any investigating anymore? In that light it's good to have the incompetent higher up so that the people doing the real work are those that are competent. :)
I really, really, really tried my best, but the only appropriate i could think of was "Fucking hell!".
Are you sure they're not a realtor masquerading as a....well, at this point, who gives a shit?
Maybe I can moonlight as a writer in Hollywood
Not ragging on real estate agents, it's not an easy thing to pull off; convincing someone to hand you 3-6% of the biggest financial transaction they've ever made just for you to negotiate for what's probably a grand total of a few hours and do some online shopping. And they do provide value insofar as knowing the landscape can really help a client avoid getting bent over a barrel.
Source: did it myself (poorly, which is why I'm in tech).
This really surprises me.
I would have assumed that an FBI memory card used for taking surveillance photos would have all kinds of security and encryption on it for chain-of-custody purposes. Otherwise, the photos won't stand up in court.
The healthcare company I work for has cameras it uses for photos, and for HIPAA reasons those cards are encrypted and secured. They won't even mount on an unauthorized computer.
It's why the cameras police departments use cost 5x more than the consumer versions.
I've wasted so many days viewing flats/apartments because the Photos looked amazing, and the actual property was utterly awful.
issues: - narrow/steep Staircases - very old photos (now the place a dump) - fish-eye lenses (or similar) enlarging the space - etc etc et bloody cetera :(
nice post
The second entry at the moment is an example of really bad staging.
But yes there are plenty of bad staging photos, and at least one totally ridiculous photoshop (the sofa planted completely out of perpective and in front of a mirror that ought to be reflecting it).
I’d guess it’s this. I think you can colour it yourself after you hang it.
I would also want it to actually fit on the wall and not be awkwardly cut off on the right edge.
What focal length would you like the photos to be taken at?
What I am used to in the area I currently live in, is much, much worse - and actual incompetence on the side of the agent. And what's worse, you see it all the time! Here are a few highlights:
- A total of five pictures for the property, all of which are of the outside, none of the rooms.
- Blurry pictures as if someone first had to learn not to move the camera in the middle of taking a shot.
- Severely tilted pictures, as if taken on a boat.
- Three pictures of some door (the same door each time, mind you)
- ...
You might think this is a joke, and I wish it was. Unfortunately, though, this kind of thing is commonly found on real estate websites where I live. I don't know how anyone can ever get traction - I guess it must be a seller's market.
The 2021 ad for our current rental had 1 interior picture. It was an old crayon drawing on wrinkled paper. The listing got 50 applications in the 2 hours it was up.
In that market, an ad that said nothing but 'Rental Available' would have been flooded with applications - every day.
It's less awful now. Many people have transitioned to homelessness and the rental market has eased up a little bit.
Well that's a sad state of affairs.
As for the points you say, I'm not into real estate, I think often it comes down to limitations from reality. You know, actual _people_ live in those apartments you're trying to have pictures of. Maybe they'll just deny you entry (it's their place, after all, they might be renting and thus not give a damn about you willing to sell the property), in which case all you have to show is pictures from the outside. Or they might only agree to send you pictures themselves, in which case blurry pictures is all you get.
Of course, in general it's mostly incompetence, but hey, if everybody were perfect at their job the world would look totally different, in more important sectors than real estate...
Turns out, the wife was trying to make it unappealing. She didn't want to move, but her husband did. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was the case in at least some of these photos.
This was mostly just bad houses. In some cases, the photographer seemed to do a decent job of making the best of it.
A friend pointed out that the lighting was off because every single one was photoshopped with one of a few pictures of a sunny blue sky with just a few clouds in the background, despite likely having been taken on a grey, fully cloudy day.
On a similar theme is Zillow Gone Wild https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild and McMansion Hell https://mcmansionhell.com/
Keep working on those art house photos, Sandra. But maybe keep them out of the listings, hmm?
I'm saying that as a Canadian who is exposed to both cultures. Also sorry.
It's punching down.
In fact, the article you posted here traffics to a large extent, with either implied or explicit ridicule, in the attempts of what look like struggling and desperate people to sell their neglected properties.
One should not laugh at people with bad taste. It’s bad taste combined with power and money (Trump: a convenient example) where the lack of taste makes the world uglier, because it’s jammed into the public eye.
It's looking down on people with >million-dollar, ten-thousand square foot homes that are also designed and decorated in an ugly and/or antiquated manner.
And the author is never shy to admit her own low-key low-brow style preferences; I don't sense any refined/pretentious vibes at all.
Well, it is safe-ish, in that street crime is usually not too high.
But living in car-centric suburbs, with a lack of common, public spaces and physical and social isolation isn't really comfortable, or that good for your mental and emotional health.
Kate Wagner does a fanastic job of distilling the history and language and sensibilities of architecture down into something that anybody can appreciate.
And quite the opposite of snobbish, she presents her critiques in a raw, geeky, low-brow format that would probably feel at home on 4chan or SomethingAwful.
She is not knocking down regular suburban homes and families -- she critiques the top few percent who live in ostentatiously monstrous homes.
Kate is a treasure and her site is a pleasure.
If the design goals for the houses presented on McMansion Hell were simply that - comfort and safety - I'd have to agree with your assessment. But houses appear there because they seemingly have one over-arching design goal which is to appear impressive and thereby signal the owner's wealth. Most of the content points to the sheer purposelessness of certain architectural features, highlighting the owner's need for recognition over utility.
That kind of inept, absurd pretension is a recipe for comedy.
It's a lot of work to visit a house you might want to buy, but there's about 0 percent chance you buy one without doing so. So the agent must optimize to get you there, essentially by lying with photographs.
This sets wrong expectations, and it's always disappointing to visit because it's never what the photos told you.
You get used to it as a buyer, but setting you up with wrong expectations isn't really what the buyer or seller wants.
Some of these aren't really bad photos, they're just a hard thing to sell. And some others are bad only because they're too honest.
Many are just bad of course. But the fire one is brilliant.
I am not interested in spending time debugging it, and I can live without seeing those photos.
Better spend that time whining here, where I suppose the ratio of web developers is high: what happened to web development? How come is it so complicated to write a site that displays some photos without falling apart at the first not-totally-mainstream user agent?
Just wow.
I never really used Tumblr, I just know it's the site Yahoo bought many years ago instead of Netflix.
The website in this submission is probably just a low technical effort site. This would explain its flaws.
I even tried edge and it doesn't work.
If the listing lists a room, but there isn't a picture of it, there's usually a good reason.
Real life example: saw a house listed with four bedrooms, listing had pictures of two. The remaining two were unfinished to the point of not having drywall on the ceiling or finished floor materials on the floor.
There's also erotic wall art, which in my mind an agent that gave a shit would have removed for the listing.
I'm still only an amateur voyeur. Pros in my country would attend open home day, where you can go into homes for sale without an appointment. You take your spouse, tour the homes, feast on the free cake and drinks, and never make any offer. A fun and affordable day out for the family, kind of like a real-world Pinterest.
But I remember the days where the agent would stand at the end of the driveway and snap a polaroid. Invariably these were the "garage forward" kind of house, which from that perspective looked like a big garage door with a house kind of attached in the back, in a by-the-the-way fashion. Awful. Of course that vintage of house (mid 80s) kind of was that way.
Chefkoch is a German website where users share recipes. Some of them show off their unholy contraptions in gross photos which is then collected by the mentioned blog.
https://www.immoweb.be/en/classified/mixed-use-building/for-...
https://www.immoweb.be/en/classified/house/for-sale/anderlec...
https://www.immoweb.be/en/classified/apartment/for-sale/brux...
I expect the next phase of these sites liberally employ the use of AI tools for image generation, i.e. "an apartment with a lawn mower in it".
Loved this site. Gave me a really nostalgic feeling of the web from 2010 era. Early social media.
It turns out the owner was just an older man who wasn’t good with tech, the place was pretty great in person and I ended up living there for a couple of years.
Normal untouched photos are more honest. I also dislike when photos make it ambiguous which unit in a duplex is for sale, or don’t make clear/hide that it’s only part of a lot or something like that.
Obviously I'd still want to have the name of the book on the spine though. Or to be able to have it colour coded by genre or something, just something more aesthetically pleasing really.
(Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/993/)
completely baffling and infuriating to me as you have no way of knowing what you're looking at. easiest job in the world here.
Such a terrible experience as a buyer, i’m baffled this whole charade hasn’t been disrupted by tech already.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/17/online-esta...
I guess real estate agents are so good at marketing that we believe it's a hard job that we can't do ourselves.
Yes, that's their job and primary purpose. Yes it's hard. Most people have anxiety to even talk to their neighbors without sweating.
Sure there are lots of idiots out there, like in every profession. But those who are not idiots are providing a valuable service. Try selling your house yourself and then let's chat again about how it's not a hard job that you could just do yourself.
Real estate agent are always hitting the nail with the message that we won't have to worry if we hire them. And because of that message, people have a tendency to think that selling is worrying.
If you are genuinely worried with the selling process, like if you have trouble speaking to your neighbour, sure hire an agent. Same if you don't have the time to do it yourself. You'll pay them for the real service they provide and their real purpose.
If you are worried because they told you it's worrying, see for yourself.
So, all those folks definitely got something out of hiring a realtor. Nothing to do with "legal stuff". Most people are just terrible at presenting and selling things. And that's fine. Claiming otherwise is closing your eyes for what's out there in the real world.
My favourite is an attic divided by a wall of plasterboard, where on one side you have a full bathroom, on the other a bed. Floor panels everywhere, especially next to the tub. Only one window - on the side of the bathroom.
With high end 70s chintz and cheese production values.
1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kynbFDou6GI&feature=youtu.be&c...
I really don't understand 1) how people take such bad/blurry/small photos or 2) why they choose to use them in listings.
Sure, sometimes it's the latter and sometimes it's both, but in most cases a photo just shows the property and its flaws. And in this context I'd say that's a good photograph.
We were supposed to be auditioning the RE agent but we walked out saying “this is the house we’re going to buy.”
IE bought 40 years ago, never changed, the children just want a quick cash out now.
I've viewed a dozen that would make it on to this blog this year alone.
It's hilarious! I can't believe those are real pictures taken by real realtors! It wears off pretty quickly.
And as is typical for these websites, eventually they get under pressure to keep producing new content even when they don't have any actual bad realtor pics on hand, so they start reaching.
What do you expect them to do if the property is still inhabited by the current tenant/owner? The doors both say "Diana," so what?
https://plaintextoffenders.com/ stopped after 10 years and 5880 posts which is more than one post per day, all user submissions.
Ever looked at a property website? There's an infinite supply.
Myself, I prefer bad estate agent written copy; much of it is comically awful.
Living Hell Rooms
The actual caption which made me wonder if he was wrong.
…. but for agent portraits.
But yeah, I'm generally puzzled when sites disable that very useful feature.
What does a real estate agent do? They unlock doors.
Who are real estate agents? We can all think of a few real estate agents, none of them are top performers. They are usually on their ~4th career before the age of 30. They are the type of person to wear a suit in public to pretend that it makes them important.
I know an exception to the rule, except he sells multi-family real estate, and owns ~10 single family homes himself. I'd hardly call him a real estate agent at this point, he is a landlord.
Heck, you can buy over 1000 security cameras and still save money.
I was curious and did the math. I'm using motion sensitive security cameras that only record and upload when motion is detected. At the places with the most expensive residential electricity in the US or the EU 1000 of those cameras would need under $5 of electricity per year. There's also the thing that the cameras upload to. I don't know how much power that uses, but it is powered by a 5 W USB power supply so can't be more than $22/year.
Oh no, we had a bug once when our software uploaded the property to the web with the address unlocked. The place got swarmed by people who would just enter the property at any time, not giving a damn about the owner's privacy. They were ringing the doorbell, asking about the price and if they could see the place right then and there. Agents are the first line of defense against shitty people.
Sure, you can do all that yourself if you want, but for the average person, they are providing value.
* They've seen a lot of houses, and know what to look out for even before you commit to calling in inspectors.
* They've seen a lot of closings, and can handle all of the title/law crud. "Quick closing" can be a big plus to some sellers.
* They've seen a lot of negotiations, and can help you get a feel for how the other party is thinking.
There certainly are people who unlock the door, stare at their phone all day, and collect their commission. Those aren't very good agents, even if they can get the job done when the market is extremely short on supply.
Rental brokers on the other hand… now they’re absolutely useless and you can sometimes pay astronomical brokers fees just so they can sit between you and the landlord.
He also didn’t mind seeing a bunch of houses because even if we weren’t interested in a house it built up his knowledge about the market and could possibly recommend the house to others.
We did have another realtor that wasn’t like that though when we were considering moving to another state, who mainly was just there to show houses and never pointed anything out, in fact she barely talked.
Didn’t really see the value with her, although shortly after the mortgage rates jacked up fast and made moving less appealing (we looked just before the Fed jacked up interest rates), so we didn’t go any further in the process anyway.
I've seen cases where the sales agent knew the seller's minimum and basically told that to the buyer. They didn't negotiate on the seller's behalf so much as negotiate to get the deal done quicker.
I'm sure the buyer's agent looked good to the buyer. This scenario and the one you describe are almost indistinguishable, depending on which party you are.
Without the agents, you'd have two people attempting to negotiate a 6 (or 7, nowadays!) figure purchase directly. Before it was over, you'd hate the other party too much to ever complete a sale.
Agents sit between the two parties and have a vested interest in seeing a transaction take place. They talk to each other and soften the communication so that you can tell someone you want to pay them fifty-fucking-grand less money for the single largest asset in their life that they were counting on to fund their retirement, and have that met with a counter-offer instead of an angry storming off.
I remember reading about the fact that, at the time, most apartments in NYC were "broker only" (aka you can only see and then rent an apartment if you are using a licensed real estate broker).
The more I thought about this, I started to see the benefits for both sides:
- for the landlord: the broker acts as a filter for people who are serious vs "looky loos" (actual quote from a real broker)
- for the tenant: the broker wants repeat business so they will, in theory, only deal with reputable landlords
- for the tenant part 2: if you are a busy, hard working individual, the broker acts as your "agent" (in the principal agent sense of the word) to save you time by going and finding apartments for you so that you can focus on your high paying job.
The job literally could not exist anywhere else because no one would pay it. But they aren't making any more land in Manhattan and they aren't building subway lines quick enough so landlords get to pass that expense off to tenants
Alternately in the North East then I had a much different experience (albeit only on the buying side) - estate agents were almost exclusively women who answered phones, and viewings were done by the sellers themselves.
Did dropping acid enhance your vacation, or does LSD also stand for something else?
“So I once played poker with a gorilla and [insert point]” and everybody only talks about the point and not the gorilla???
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Our agent (used twice, 15 years apart) was great. Both times, in strong sellers markets, so lots of offers made and rejected. Lots of last second "OMG, just listed, can we see it NOWNOWNOW!"
Very expensive, but so is a house.
Now that I've been through the process a few times, could I do it without? Probably. At the right price, would I use an agent regardless? Absolutely. The old 6% rate seems quite high for a basic sale given online MLS listings, though for a very specific home in a small market, might still be worth that (I'm think lake homes in my neighborhood - rare listings, selling for $50k+ premium over non-lake on same street, often have a buyer lined up before listing, so really hard to actually buy one without an agent who knows people).
It’s because most agents work as self-employed contractors under the auspices of a brokerage, and the brokerage is not going to allow that. And/ or, in a state using standardized legal documents, we don’t even have a form for that, which means we’d need to come up with an hourly contract from scratch - and the brokerages will put their foot down on that too.
I admit finding a real estate agent who you can trust is not easy. I don't know how to do it, other than from who you know. I was lucky, and ours was a friend of my wife's family.
Think of real estate agents through the perspective of the 10x programmers we love to talk about here. The multitude of agents are as you describe - they publish listing photos from their phone, they know how to open a door, and then can mostly write down what you tell them on standardized forms. A 10x agent on the other hand, will absolutely benefit you in the same way that a 10x programmer will outproduce. Classic 80/20 rule stuff, where you want to be working with the 20 and ignore the 80.
They get 5% of most single family residential transactions. And recently it was 6% that was standard. And the industry works really hard to protect those profits.
It is a lot of money that comes right out of consumers pockets.
He never actually said "don't buy this house" at any property we looked at, but he would point out things I wouldn't have thought about like, "it's nice, but I wonder if there's a lot of noise from that street later in the day when people are home from work" or "I guess you wouldn't want to play with marbles in here" (house with a sloping floor likely due to foundation shifting) and a lot of other remarks to point out things that I, as an apartment dweller, wouldn't have considered.
I may have gotten that first house entirely due to him: I wanted to lowball the offer, but he pointed out that that neighborhood was a hot area and the house was very reasonably priced. I later found out that there was actually a slightly higher offer than mine, but since I had offered the asking price and came in first, the owners thought it was only ethical that they sell to me.
I've certainly met useless RE agents since, but there are definitely some that earn their percentage! The guy who sold my last house was also a builder and he fixed a problem that would have held up the sale on his own dime!
Taking hints from realtors is a skill. They are so subtle. I got exactly the same experience.
> Who are real estate agents? We can all think of a few real estate agents, none of them are top performers. They are usually on their ~4th career before the age of 30. They are the type of person to wear a suit in public to pretend that it makes them important.
Let's not pretend the software engineering world isn't full of hubris. Even the title itself is illegal in parts of the world because our career isn't a real engineering field.
"It requires professional help to facilitate emotionally charged, million+ dollar transactions" would be the more useful insight.
Very few people chose to forego aan agent when dealing in RE, there's a reason for that. I am a finance dude quite capable of negotiating etc and I still found out agent super valuable and would use her again.
It's possible you know crappy agents who deal in low-end transactions but again that may reveal more about you than the field.
I think it depends on the local market, but this was certainly my feeling when trying to rent a place in London. I visited 15 properties in a couple of days. Most agents just unlocked the door, sometimes seeing the place for the first time, most often clueless about the place. Actually a couple of them weren't even able to open the door and didn't have the right key.
That doesn't mean I won't try the easy/cheap way first next time, but it does mean I no longer dismiss all realtors as useless parasites who need to be "disrupted" at all costs.