How to photograph your own home to sell it without an agent

To photograph your own home for a for sale by owner listing, prepare it more thoroughly than seems necessary, then shoot each room from a corner, holding your phone level at chest height in landscape orientation, with every light on. Take an exterior photo of the front when the sun is shining on the house. Upload around 22 to 27 photos, the range Zillow recommends, after correcting the lighting and straightening any leaning walls.

You don't need a DSLR. You need a clean house, a charged phone and about two hours. Here's how I'd do it.

Why the photos matter more when you sell it yourself

An agent's listing is published in the MLS (in your market: realestate.com.au or Domain), syndicated across property websites and promoted to buyers by another agent. Your listing mostly lives on platforms such as Zillow's FSBO listings, which are free and allow unlimited photos. The photos are doing the selling work an agent would otherwise do. They determine whether someone calls you.

Zillow's photography guide says homes with fewer than nine photos were about 20% less likely to sell within 60 days. That research dates from 2019, but the lesson hasn't changed: too few photos can make buyers assume you're hiding something.

Preparation: the day before

Buyers assume that everything they see in a photo comes with the property or tells them how well it has been maintained. Go room by room.

• Clear every benchtop. Toaster, knife block, dish rack, soap, sponges. Leave one plant or a bowl of lemons if you like.
• Take down the fridge magnets and school photos. Zillow's guide calls this depersonalising. Buyers need to picture their own belongings in the space, not yours.
• Put away toys, pet bowls, the pet bed, shoes by the door and the pile of mail.
• Make up every bed and smooth the duvet flat. Wrinkles look worse in photos than in person.
• Wash the windows inside and out, and remove the flyscreens from the windows you'll photograph. Flyscreens make windows look grey.
• Replace dead bulbs and try to match the colour temperature. One cool-white bulb in a room of warm-white bulbs shows up as a blue patch.
• Outside: mow the lawn, sweep the front path and driveway, coil the hose and move the bins into the garage.

If the rooms are crowded with furniture, move some of it out for the shoot. Less furniture can make a room look bigger, and you'll be packing it away beforehand anyway.

The shot list

This is the list I'd use for a typical three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. It comes to about 25 photos.

1. Front exterior at an angle from one front corner, showing the front and a bit of the side. Zillow's guide recommends this because it shows the depth of the house.
2. Front exterior straight on from across the street.
3. Entrance, looking in from the front door.
4. Living room from two corners.
5. Kitchen from two or three angles, including one that shows how it connects to the dining or living area.
6. Dining area.
7. Main bedroom from the corner opposite the bed.
8. Main bathroom.
9. Each other bedroom, one photo each.
10. Other bathrooms, one photo each.
11. Anything buyers will ask about: a finished basement, a home office, a large walk-in wardrobe, the laundry room if it's nice.
12. Rear of the house and the yard, plus the patio or deck.
13. Garage, only if it's clean.

Take several frames of each and keep the best. Our full real estate photo shot list goes deeper on angles for each room.

How to hold the phone

Four habits make the difference between a decent property listing and a poor one.

• Horizontal, always. Listing sites display photos in a wide frame. Vertical shots are reduced in size and padded with grey bars.
• Chest height. Zillow's guide says chest height gives the most accurate perspective, and I agree. Eye level shows too much floor or ceiling.
• Level. Turn on the grid in your camera settings and line up a door frame with a vertical line. If you tilt the phone, walls appear to lean. Fixing leaning vertical lines explains why.
• Ultra-wide for rooms, 1x for details. The 0.5x lens fits an entire bedroom into the frame. Keep furniture away from the edges, where it gets distorted.

Before each shot, tap a wall, not the window, so the phone sets the exposure for the room. On an iPhone, our iPhone guide has the exact settings. The same principles apply on Android.

Lighting and timing

Turn on every light, open every blind, and photograph the interior in the middle of the day, when the rooms are brightest. For the front of the property, Zillow's advice is to shoot with the sun behind you so it lights the front of the house. That means mornings for east-facing fronts and afternoons for west-facing fronts. Our exterior photo guide covers homes facing north and south, as well as overcast days.

Zillow's photo guide for sellers also suggests replacing a grey sky with a blue one. I'd skip that. Buyers drive by before they book an inspection. If the photo shows a blue sky over a house they're inspecting on a grey afternoon, their first impression when they arrive is that your photos aren't straight with them. That's a bad start when you're also the one doing the negotiating.

Editing on your phone

Even carefully taken phone photos can end up with a yellow cast from the light bulbs, windows blown out to white and walls that appear to lean by a degree or two. You can fix all of that in your phone's photo editor in just a few minutes per photo. Keep it light. Turning brightness and saturation up too far makes rooms look fake, and buyers see that as a cover-up.

Real Estate Camera was built for exactly this. Photograph with the app or upload photos you've already taken using the web version. Enhance corrects lighting, white balance and vertical alignment, restoring the view through the windows in 20 to 60 seconds for 1 credit. It keeps the sky as you photographed it and leaves the house itself untouched.

Your first credit is free, so you can test it on your worst photo before paying anything. A listing with 25 photos uses 25 credits for Enhance. The 60-credit pack costs $24.99, credits never expire, and if an edit fails, you're refunded automatically.

If you've already moved out

Empty rooms are hard to assess from photos. Buyers can't judge size without furniture. Virtual staging adds furniture to an empty room in one of eight styles, for 2 credits a photo. Stage the lounge and main bedroom, and leave the other rooms empty. Does virtual staging help sell a house explains which rooms are worth it.

If you're still living there and can't clear out a room, Declutter removes furniture and décor and recreates the flooring and walls behind them. It also costs 2 credits.

Either way, label the photo. California's AB 723 disclosure law was written for licensed agents and brokers, not owners, but buyers don't care who took the photo. Use "virtually staged" in the photo caption or listing description, and post the empty version alongside it. The app flags every staged result and asks you to confirm the disclosure when you export. It doesn't add a label to the image, so you'll need to add the caption yourself. The MLS staging rules guide explains what agents are required to do, which is a good standard to follow.

Before you post

• Arrange the photo gallery in the order a buyer walks through the property: front exterior, entrance, lounge, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, backyard.
• Make the first photo the best exterior shot. It's the thumbnail buyers see in search results.
• View every photo full screen on your phone. Check mirrors, oven doors and windows for reflections of yourself.
• Delete near-duplicates. Two good shots of the kitchen, not five.
• Check that nothing visible in the photos is missing from the property. If you've sold the dining table, don't show it.

Then list the property. If a photo performs poorly, you can reshoot one room on a better day without redoing the whole set.

To shoot and edit your listing in one app, see the real estate photography app.

Edit your own listing photos on your phone. Start free: 1 credit.