Everyone knows that good picutre can make or break a listing, and of course perhaps the essential ingredient of a good picture is proper lighting, both indoors and out. There’s nothing like a flickering flourescent bulb to make that lovely basement rec room look like a serial killer’s dungeon, and nothing like a iron-grey sky to make that spacious roof deck look like something the buyer will want to jump off of rather than barbecue out on.
On the other hand, when the market’s hot and the buyers are biting, there’s no time to wait around for weeks for the weather to clear in order to snap a few photos. So what’s a real estate agents in a pepetually cloudy, misty place like Seattle to do?
Import sky, of course. Czech sky, in particular. There’s something about that middle-European air that just screams sophistication.
Or at least, that’s the solution that seems to have been dreamed up by some agents using a West Coast Real estate photography agency called Vicaso. One of the sharp-eyed geeks over at Redfin spotted something a little fishy in some of the MLS photos archived on the site. He’s managed to collect a pool of over 300 examples of different listings using the same stock photo shot “Czech sky” over at Redfin’s Pinterest-like photo-collection site, Redfin Collections. Once you spot the trick, it’s sort of shocking how bad the mismatch between the sky and the other light sources in the picture are. Maybe photoshop isn’t a listing agent’s best friend after all.
