Selling? See Ideal Number of Listing Photos
These days, most savvy shoppers start with an online search before hitting the pavement. That means that as a seller, you need to make your listing as attractive and strategic as possible in order to get a quick sale for the best possible price. To that end, we’ve determined the best times to list your home for sale in each borough, as well as best words to use in a listing description.
Next, we looked at listing photos. Since buyers have thousands of listings at their fingertips, they tend to judge an apartment by its cover. Therefore, if your listing photos are blurry, unflattering or non-existent, you may miss out on attracting the right buyer as your listing gets passed over in favor of those with better visual representation. It’s common sense that having quality photos – or any photos at all – should give sellers an advantage. But, is there a magic number of photos you should have in a listing?
As it turns out, there is. We call it the “sweet spot” of number of photos per listing.
Our data analytics team analyzed for-sale listings based on number of photos, exploring the contact rate per number of photos. What we found was that the likelihood of a buyer contacting an agent on a listing actually doubles on listings with one to three photos versus zero photos. And the percentages go up as the number of photos goes up – to a point.
For example, if a listing has between four and 10 listing photos, there is a 5x likelihood that a buyer will contact an agent. But as for that magic number — that sweet spot — we found that when a listing has 11 to 14 photos, there is a 6x more likely chance a buyer will contact the selling agent versus a listing with zero photos.
There is one caveat here, however. Lest you start thinking more is better, we found that beyond 15 photos, the likelihood of agent contacts actually starts to drop back down. So our advice is to stick to that sweet spot of 11 to 14 photos per listing, which will ensure your home is accurately represented in an appealing way, without overwhelming potential buyers with an excessive amount of images.