Including the part where I shot my own rentals on an iPhone and told myself it was fine.
I spent five years as a licensed agent at Compass on Newbury Street. Now I photograph listings for other agents instead.
People assume that means I soured on the business. I didn't. I still like real estate and I like the people in it. But I'd been doing camera work for over a decade before I ever got licensed, and eventually it stopped making sense to keep those two halves separate. The creative side was the part I actually wanted to spend my days on. So I picked it.
What I didn't expect was how much I'd gotten wrong from the other chair.
Start with the one that's hardest to write.
I shot plenty of my own listings on my phone. Rentals especially. And the reasoning felt airtight at the time: a rental commission is small, hiring a photographer takes a real bite out of it, and I could be in and out of the unit in ten minutes. If you'd asked me, I'd have said the photos were fine.
They weren't fine.
I want to be careful with this next part, because "you should hire a professional photographer" is exactly what you'd expect a professional photographer to say, and you should discount it accordingly. So here's the version I'd have believed back then, stripped of the sales pitch.
The economics I was running were real but incomplete. I was weighing the photographer's fee against a small commission, which is a fair thing to weigh. What I wasn't counting was that the listing photos are the entire first impression for a property, and they're doing that work whether they're good or not. A rental that sits an extra two weeks costs more than the shoot did. So does one that draws the wrong tenant because the unit looked worse online than it does in person.
This is why I eventually built a scaled-down package specifically for rentals. Not out of generosity. Because the real problem was that agents were choosing between full price and their phone, and there wasn't anything in between.
Here's the other belief I carried around: that a good photographer works magic. That you hand someone a property and they come back with something great, and whatever state the place was in is a detail they handle.
That's not how it works, and I feel a little embarrassed about how long I believed it.
A photographer can control light, angle, lens, and editing. What we can't do is make a cluttered counter look uncluttered, or put back the lawn nobody mowed, or move the cars out of the driveway after the fact. Editing has limits, and past those limits you're either spending an hour retouching one frame or you're delivering something that looks retouched. Neither is good.
The prep is not a courtesy to the photographer. It's the largest single variable in how the photos come out, and it's the one entirely in the seller's control. I say that as someone who used to skip it and then wonder why the shots were mediocre.
Everything above is about how photos get made. This one is about what happens after, and it's the one I'd fix first if I could go back.
I treated listing photos as MLS assets. You order photos, you upload photos, done. That's the whole lifecycle.
Look at what that leaves on the table. You paid for a full set of images of a property, and they get one placement, on a platform people visit when they're already looking. Meanwhile nobody I knew was cutting vertical video from a shoot. Nobody was posting the good frames to social. The photos existed to satisfy a field in a form.
The agents I watch do this well now get two things out of one shoot. Eyeballs on the listing, which is the obvious one. And eyeballs on them, which is the one that compounds. A well-shot listing posted to Instagram isn't only marketing that property. It's showing every other seller in that neighborhood what hiring you looks like.
That's the part I'd tell my younger self. The shoot isn't the deliverable. The shoot is the raw material, and most agents are using about a fifth of what they already paid for.
Prep the property. Not because I'm asking nicely, but because it's the cheapest thing on this list and it changes the result more than any gear decision.
Stop treating the phone and the full shoot as the only two options. If the budget genuinely doesn't support a full package, ask what a scaled-down version looks like. Most photographers would rather build you something that fits than lose the job to a phone.
And use what you get. Every one of those images can live somewhere other than the MLS. If your photographer isn't giving you anything you can post, that's worth a conversation, because the marginal cost of a vertical cut from a shoot that already happened is close to nothing.
I don't think I was a bad agent. I think I was a normal one, making normal tradeoffs with incomplete information about a part of the job nobody really teaches. It took moving to the other side of the camera to see what I'd been leaving on the table.
Chris Palladino is the founder of 37 Visuals, a real estate photography and video company serving Greater Boston and the North Shore. He spent five years as a licensed agent at Compass before moving behind the camera full time, and is an FAA Part 107 certified remote pilot.
Room-by-room, the things that actually change how a listing photographs. Send it to your seller when the shoot gets booked.