Pictures Lie

A picture might be worth a thousand words but in the real estate industry they can be near worthless. Pictures of a property are nice to see and do a good job of giving a basic idea of what it is like, but they don't tell everything. Pictures can be manipulated in a variety of ways. Anyone that has engaged in online dating knows this.

I know how this works as I have looked at pictures and then gone to a property to then return home to review the pictures again. I have seen where they have angled the picture ever so slightly to leave out certain defects in a wall or to not show an old light fixture. I have seen a property that had no backyard and there wasn't a picture online that showed this. These are all things that can only be learned by visiting a property.


The other main downside to pictures is that they are visual and only visual. A picture can't tell you that jets fly over the property every five minutes, that the last family that lived there had really bad BO and the stench permeates the house, or that the dry wall feels warped and wavy to the touch. Being in a property allows a person to know all of these things.

Furthermore pictures exist in a 2D world and we live in a 3D one. Pictures are not set to any type of scale and what looks like a large room in a picture might look like a small room in real life. Pictures also show only one angle of a room whereas a person standing in that room can turn and look at it from all angles. They can see the living room as it looks entering from the foyer or from the side hall, and while standing in the living room they can turn and see how it looks in a 360 degree world.

We live in a world where people want to do everything online and there are some sights that lead people to believe everything can be done online, but with real estate that just isn't the case. Nothing can replace standing in a home and looking at it from every angle. Spending time in it to find all its benefits and defects. Looking at the tax records and a few pictures online can give a person an idea of what a property is like, but it cannot come close to telling the entire story.