At midmorning, sunlight streams through three sets of windows, creating an elongated pane pattern on the floor of a Reisterstown house.
"This is nice, because you have this floor, you have nice shadows on the wood," says photographer Craig Westerman, sizing up the room.
Click.
The image captures the breakfast room from the recessed lighting to the Brazilian cherry floors. It shows a slice of the kitchen at just the right angle to showcase the space's openness.
As the owner/photographer of Hometrack in Baltimore, Westerman makes his living photographing houses for sale - and he's snapped thousands of photos in the area since starting a part-time business in 1996 and going to full time in 2002.
This cavernous 7,100-square-foot house built on spec is empty, and Westerman's job is to convey in images its style and amenities.
"It's important. It's a new era where people can go online and decide whether they want to see [a house] or not," said the builder, Tom Dickson, president of Limited Homes.
One-hundred-plus photos later, Westerman's out the door. By the week's end, his three-person company will have produced a color brochure, and as many as 30 of his photos will appear with the nearly $2 million listing on about a dozen Web sites.
A generation ago, this sort of business didn't exist.
But consumer demand for photos has exploded; would-be homebuyers have come to expect them as part of a property's marketing. More than four out of five house-hunters start looking online, and industry surveys indicate that listings without photos often don't make it onto their radar screen. Photos, especially the better ones, can show a house to its best advantage and give it an inviting air.
"You need to capture the essence of a house with photography," said Cindy Conklin, a partner in Yerman Witman Gaines & Conklin in Baltimore. At that company, photos are taken by outside professionals and agents as well as by a designer in a marketing wing, which also produces listing brochures. "I am big on how we represent our properties."
Brochures with crisp photos are house introductions and take-aways from visits. A listing agent's e-mail blast or postcard revealing a few photos may go to other agents to entice them to a brokerage open house.
"If someone is from out of town, and they look at 15 houses, it's important to have the brochure to help you remember what you've seen," said Nancy Hubble, who leads the Hubble Bisbee Group of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage's Greenspring Valley office, and who has most listings photographed professionally.
