Messy Minolta (or How Not to Market Your Home)

A picture’s worth a thousand words…

It never failes to astound me the number of people who put their house on the market for hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet choose photographs to share with prospective buyers that turn people off. Buyers make decisions about whether to take the time to go see a house by the pictures that are displayed for the property. Good pictures can beckon. Bad ones can results in a quick click to another property.

Some bad examples (click on the picture to see it in great detail):

The refrigerator shouts “Psst, let me tell you how sloppy the owners really are…”

“Hey, buddy. I’m Rolf, the household German Shepard. I’m only in this cage to keep the photographer safe. You should see what I’ve done with the rest of the house–scratched up the hardwood floors, left stains and smells in the bedroom carpets, and gnawed on the door frames.”

Can you believe this is the master bathroom in a $1.5 million house? Gee I wouldn’t have guessed a millionaire would use Electrosol shaving creme!

Oh, did we mention that we can’t drink the water from our faucet?

Look at this pool–it’s got a waterfall and everything. Why didn’t I just take the time to remove the noodles? Oh, look closely and you can see where I crudely used some graphics program to try to erase some enormous inflatable floats from the middle of the pool!

Ah, now we’re talkin’. Some good examples:

What a lovely hallway!

Oh my, look at what tasty delicacies can be created in this deluxe kitchen.

Can you imagine a more serene place to eat that tasty pie from the kitchen?

Anyway, the pictures make my point–and that’s the whole point. ‘Nuf said.

Do you have examples of hilarous photos used to market houses? Share them with the rest of the world, by attaching url links in your comments below.

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC. 

“I mean, give me any tool and I’m in trouble. I have yet to learn the mysteries of a screwdriver. My wife and daughter would go hide when I’d start to hang a painting.” –Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones, most popularly known for his creation of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, astutely judged his ability with hammer and nail.  Turns out most people are in the same league with Chuck when it comes to hanging paintings on a wall.  I don’t know how many open houses I’ve walked into that I immediately knew at least one person of at least 6′ in height must live there.  Every painting, picture, and poster seemed as if it was personally hung to accentuate the fact that my mere 5′2″ puts me forehead height with the bottom of the frame.  What should have been a complement to the home became an Alice in Wonderland-esque distraction. 

Don’t think, though, that because I’m short I am immune to this problem.  In 1995, when it can time to sell our first home, a quaint cape in the South Hull District in Montgomery, Alabama, Wilson and I contacted Sandra Nickel, one of the top producing agents in Montgomery.  She deployed her staging assistant, who took one look at our walls, and said “where’s your hammer?”  She lowered every one of our pictures by six inches.  The house sold in three weeks!

How To Hang ‘Em

Art galleries hang paintings such that the viewer is slightly looking down at them.  Generally, hanging pictures at a 57-inch centerline should be appropriate.  To do this, measure 57 inches straight up the length of the wall from the floor and mark this point.  Hang your painting so that the centerline of the painting is aligned with this mark.  Measure from the middle of the picture to the top of the stretched picture wire or the picture hooks and add this measurement to the 57 inches to come up with the total distance from the floor at which you should hammer the nail.  That’s it.

Beyond that, get creative…  Michael’s Arts and Crafts provides nice suggestions for clustering paintings and other artwork.

Well hung paintings won’t sell a house; but they will help prospective buyers focus on the what’s really important–the house itself!

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC.