Prepare your home for the shoot.

★ Start here — the 4 things most people overlook

You sell a home every few years; we’re in several every day — thousands over the years. None of these are obvious if this isn’t your world, but they make the biggest difference on shoot day.

1. Book contractors early — and have them finished before we arrive. Landscapers, painters, power-washing, cleaners and the like don’t mix with a shoot day, so schedule them well ahead and leave room for their delays. It’s natural to think we can just photograph the inside while a crew works outside — or the outside while they finish up inside — but it rarely works out: work trucks in the driveway, a ladder or worker just past a window, and tools or paint cans in the yard all tend to end up in the shots. A home that’s empty and fully finished always photographs best.
2. Set things out of sight before we arrive. A lot of homeowners figure we can just shuffle things from room to room as we go — a totally natural assumption. In practice it goes much more smoothly when anything you’d rather keep out of the photos is put away ahead of time: it gets tucked away once instead of moved again and again, and the whole shoot moves faster. It matters even more with video or a 3D tour, where moving things mid-shoot is trickier to work around. A few minutes of stowing beforehand makes a real difference.
3. Be fully shoot-ready at the appointment time. All cleaning and staging should be finished before we arrive — the day-of list below should already be done.
4. Listing a flip or investor renovation? Give it an extra check. These are where we run into surprises most — we’ll sometimes arrive to find crews still working, wet paint, or construction debris and tools still around. If the home was recently renovated, it’s worth an extra confirmation that everything’s truly finished and cleaned before we come out. We never want to charge a rescheduling or last-minute cancellation fee, so if things are running behind, just give us a heads-up and we’ll find a better date — no hassle at all.

We know this is a lot of work and can be stressful — but following this list is what produces the best possible photographs of your home. Trust us; we do this every day.