Information vs. Emotion – Which is more effective for Real Estate Photography?

Atlanta Real Estate Photography by Iran Watson

As an Atlanta Real Estate Photographer and Marietta Real Estate Agent, “how” I market a home is of crucial importance to me and so should it be to anyone that is serious about getting as many potential buyers through the door as possible.  Growing up in a real estate family, I’ve heard the words “curb appeal” more times than I care to count.  In recent years, however, those familiar words have been replaced with “web appeal” and rightfully so.  It is estimated that 90% of buyers use the internet to identify, qualify and ultimately contract to buy their next home.  I believe that fact alone makes a good case for using the best quality photography and video one can afford.  It also leads me to the premise of this blog post, what qualities should that photography and video possess in order for it to reach its maximum effectiveness?

I recently asked the question of my real estate photographer colleagues over at the Flickr Photography for Real Estate group whether they thought photography for real estate should be created with the goal of providing information or eliciting an emotional response from the viewer.  There were some interesting perspectives but they all pointed to the fact that emotive marketing imagery is a time tested, proven means to engage the viewer to take action.  But when it comes to photography for real estate, how do you define ’emotive’?  Better yet, how does one go about consistently delivering highly stylized images that evoke emotion when a lot of the time the subject (the house) isn’t all that photogenic?  The answer, for me at least, wasn’t initially that clear.

For some time, I was under the impression that a picture created to convey information followed a different recipe than one created to draw out emotion.  I think a lot of this preconception came from my limited knowledge of photography for interior design and that of proper architectural photography.  Seeing images used to sell furniture and decor in the various shelter magazines had my brain thinking that