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The Results
In most cases, when I need pictures of a property I'm trying to sell, I handle it the way most people do.
If I'm anywhere near the property, I'll swing by, whip out my phone and start snapping pictures of everything that looks interesting. The whole process will usually take about 30 minutes (or a full hour, if I include drive time).
I'm definitely NOT a pro photographer, but I'm okay – so the images are usually acceptable, but nothing amazing.
In situations where I'm not located near the subject property, I'll hire someone on Craigslist or WeGoLook and pay them somewhere in the range of $50 – $150 to visit the property and do the same thing (and the quality of these pictures will range from “average” to “subpar” – but either way, they're better than nothing).
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The difference with Pretty Instant (at least, in the first job I ever booked with them) is that the pictures are actually on the pro level.
When I booked my photoshoot, the photographer who came to my property was based in the Detroit area (so he drove over 2 hours to get to my house in Grand Rapids) and I have to say – he was pretty legit.
In my short conversation with him, I learned that he had 12 years of experience, and he regularly gets hired to do photoshoots for various trade magazines and other professionals (Pretty Instant is just one of his many different sources of work).
He was also using a Nikon D810 with a semi-wide angle lens – so in terms of quality, I knew I could expect more from this guy than some amateur pointing their phone at stuff.
He shot the photos in raw format (rather than jpeg files) and he also took shots with variations on the exposure. This meant he could easily submit the images to the team at Pretty Instant and they could process the images to look as good as possible by bringing out the colors and shadows where needed, rather than being stuck with images that would look flat and boring.
Phone Pics vs. Pretty Instant
Just to show you the difference, here are a few side-by-side comparisons of our pictures.
If you use the slider bar below, you can see the pictures I took with my iPhone 7 on the left, while the ones on the right were from the Pretty Instant photographer…
It's not that my pictures are “bad” per se, but the Pretty Instant pictures do a much better job with sharpness, clarity, field of view, color, lighting and positioning.
To the untrained eye, some of these differences may be subtle (I'll admit, I think a lower-end set of images can still do the job of informing prospects what a property looks like), but if you want to show a property in its best possible light, it's hard to do that without the right equipment AND (perhaps more importantly) a photographer who understands lighting, composition and knows how to use their tools properly.
I would imagine the results of each photoshoot will vary depending on a number of factors, but in most cases, if you're working with a pro, the images will probably come out significantly better than amateur point-and-shoot pictures.
Is It Worth the Cost?
When I look at the cost of using Pretty Instant (currently $199 for a Residential project), my opinion is that it's a pretty reasonable price for higher-end photos. Knowing what it takes to find a mediocre photographer from a website like Craigslist (a site that doesn't specialize in photography), it's a pretty decent price to pay.
I actually found and hired a pro photographer off Craigslist this past year for one of my vacant land deals. I ended up paying them $800 for a set of pictures that was very comparable to these images from Pretty Instant in terms of quality – so $199 is definitely not a bad deal for property photos that actually look good.
It's also worth noting that by using Pretty Instant, I can save myself a lot of time (which is probably the biggest value proposition for someone like me). I don't have to explain to them how to take good pictures, they'll just know how to do it.
Their entire system and website is designed precisely for the purpose of hiring out photographers – so instead of trying to find some stranger on the open market and explain to them what I need (or worse yet, doing the photoshoot myself), I can get a photographer lined up in a matter of seconds, and I know the quality will at least be better than average, if not really good.
