Our whole job is to make finding and buying homes easier, but it’s the hard to classify homes that are a deal.

If you’re willing to do a little extra work (or you have a local agent who has actually been to all the homes for sale in your area), you can really score - Frank Llosa did a little digging and found that homes for sale with fewer photos sold for less:

• 1 Photo= 91.2% of Original Price
• 6 Or more= 95% of Original Price

And they sold more slowly (DOM is Days on Market, or the number of days the house was on the market before it sold):

• 1 Photo = 70 DOM Avg
• 6 Photos =40 DOM
• 16-19 = 36 DOM
• 20 MAX= 32 DOM

(via ReAgent in Connecticut)

If Jim Duncan sold real estate in the greater Seattle area, we would recruit him for Agent Match. He’s good.

Here’s one of his clients:

We overlooked this home because it only had a photo of the outside, but the home next door to it was for sale and I found a virtual tour through Trulia- it is beautiful. Depending on the shape this one is in, we could go in at $240-250 and have some cash left for renovations. The outside looks well-kept.

The realtor is doing his client a disservice by only having one photo, but the resultant lack of interest may work to our advantage.

And here is his response:

I like to show properties that have one or fewer photos - it usually means that the Seller will have had less traffic and will therefore be more willing to negotiate a lower offer.

If your Realtor has actually seen every property you clients might want, you can seriously leverage bad staging, no staging, bad photos and inept marketing to find gems in the rough. If you’re selling, take a look at your Realtor’s past and current listings and ask yourself “would I want to check out that house?”

Every time someone tells me about a trick that helps get more money for a home seller, I can’t help but flip the idea on it’s head: logically it means homes that aren’t employing that trick are a better deal for buyers.

Deal of the day: Homes with good photos sell for more and sell sooner because they get seen by more people (I have no statistics to back this one up - anyone?). Here’s Athol, a real estate blogger with a good sense of humor who sometimes goes by “sock puppet,” on the subject:

My own home had godawful photos. But we saw it last, around the 50th home we saw. If it had had good photos, we would have seen it a lot earlier in the picture.

Also if it had good photos there would have been far more interest in it, and we’d likely have had to pay $10-20,000 more to get it.

Bad and no photo homes DO sell, just not as easily or for as much.

Bad photos mean a bad deal for the seller and a good deal for the buyer, but only if the buyer can see past them and actually visits the home.

In case you want to see how bad it can get (MLS rules prevent us from blogging about North West MLS properties), Athol runs bad photo of the day: Here’s a recent bad photo and here’s another.