This episode establishes that while professional drone photography with boundary overlays, strategic ground-level shots, and AI-enhanced editing creates better first impressions, pricing and property characteristics drive 95% of disposition success. The remaining 5% from superior marketing can generate additional clicks and calls but won’t overcome fundamental pricing or feature mismatches.
Key Takeaways:
- 10-12 Total Photos with Drone-First Strategy Lead with 5-6 drone aerials (boundary lines edited, thumbnail showing full parcel), follow with 3-4 ground shots highlighting utilities/improvements/entrances, close with base aerial from Land ID or county GIS for location context.
- First Two Weeks Generate Biggest Listing Pop Properties receive maximum attention in the initial 14 days after listing, making strategic photo refreshes during better seasons or after staleness sets in a key tactic for regenerating buyer interest.
- Hide Negatives in Broker Notes, Not Photos Old tires, trash, or other detractors should be disclosed in broker communications and negotiations rather than prominently featured in listing photography that creates initial negative impressions.
Listen to the full episode for detailed tactics on color balance, seasonal photo timing, AI-generated improvement overlays, and when to invest in re-shooting properties that haven’t moved.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital vacant land funding partner. So today I wanted to, uh, use yesterday’s podcast as a jumping off point to discuss, uh, marketing photos for, uh, property listings in a bit more detail, overarching strategy as well as some tactics. Um, so, you know, human beings, uh, visual.
creatures, of course, you know, trying to pop out initially to get people to click on a listing. Photos are usually going to be your go to, especially when it’s MLS, you’re not really able to adjust headlines really, you generally it’s just going to be restricted to
the address of the property. So it’s less so a copy perspective and much more so that first impression being the photos, particularly the main thumbnail photo that is going to attract people enough to click on a listing. You know, that’s outside of like the actual location. If the location is just pinpoint perfect for what somebody’s looking at.
photo might matter less. All this being said, even as I get into the tactics, and I repeat this often in our experience, still price and characteristics rule the day for disposition of properties. I’d say it’s at least 95 % of what’s going to drive success and getting a property sold.
Um, you know, plus or minus 5%, sometimes maybe, um, again, it kind of depends on the area, but, uh, you know, we’ve had, you know, pitch perfect marketing photos for some properties that, uh, just didn’t, didn’t move even, even when we lost money on occasion on some of these. And, um, so that.
is kind of indicative that yeah, even if your marketing is just absolutely perfect, you’re standing out better than anyone else in the market, like ultimately those base characteristics and the pricing of the property ultimately drives the vast majority of decision-making. I might get you a couple more site visits, might get you a couple more calls, but if those two items aren’t in line, the price and the characteristics, you’re not gonna…
Find the success that you’re looking for that being said again You know you want people to click you want people to get attention on your listing quickly, you know photos You always want to put a good a good foot forward with Trying to get people to click on on your listing just give in you know possible competition within the area
And you know, just whatever it takes to kind of move properties, right? never, there’s so many things that can go wrong with land or macro factors that can change suddenly on you that you never want to be shooting yourself in the foot from just not doing your upfront solid marketing tactics.
primarily from a photo’s perspective. Listing and description is secondary, in my opinion. So usually, strategy nowadays, like drone photos are just ubiquitous. Yeah, some folks are more old school realtors who might work with that, yeah, drone photos won’t look that good. In some areas, it can be tough.
there can be occasionally regulations on how high drones can go if it’s like nearby airport, something like that. Or it’s just such dense foliage or, you know, maybe it’s all out in desert squares. Like there’s not, there’s not really a great indication for differentiating the property with drone photos. So, you know, some
Some properties won’t be the best fit, but assuming you can have some distinctive features regarding your property and it’s not just a completely uniform landscape around, we’re gonna default to that. Plus, now we used to use Craigslist or droners.io to arrange our own photos oftentimes, but I’d say 90 % plus.
of the time now realtors will have, their own connections or maybe in-house, drone piloting. it’s just, it’s just a standard part of marketing real estate nowadays. So usually whenever we’re solidifying, okay, we’re going to fund this property. You already solidified a realtor like, okay, who do you know somebody, you know, drone pilot local and basically always yes. at this point and.
Usually we can just, not actually have to pay a fee. I’d say that that’s the minority of times now having to pay separately for droners. Like usually the realtor will just set it up and it’s either, again, part of their brokerage is just a complimentary service, to list the property or they’ll just pay out of pocket to cover it. So unless they ask us to pay, we,
we don’t initially offer on it. And again, I it’s usually a complimentary service for like quality photos virtually all the time to to get something done. And so we’re always trying to arrange photos for you know, to have everything set up ideally before we close on the property. Sometimes if it’s a realtor arranging it, they won’t be able to do so until we’re fully closed just for
certain regulations within their brokerage. But assuming the weather is okay, usually we’re able to schedule drone pilot out there within a day or two of closing anyway. So that’s rarely a difficult issue to get photos done compared to per test or surveys on occasion. So we’ll get that done. Oftentimes I’ll like to have
edits done to the photos so that we actually get property boundaries drawn on it and maybe labeling the acreage on the actual property. So that’s something we might more occasionally do in-house versus the drone pilot. For instance, if they can do it, great. Otherwise, yeah, we’ll do that in-house. I’ll have my VA do that. It’s usually fairly basic.
task to get that done. Again, you know, use your best judgment for the distinctions there. If there’s, again, distinctive features that made it worth doing drone photos in the first place, then yeah, you should probably throw on boundary lines at a minimum. I used to care a lot more about getting videos done as well. Usually we’ll have them done.
But because a lot of the listing sites like they don’t prominently feature avenues to display Videos like it they’re kind of buried within the UI on most listing platforms the photos seem to drive most the engagement and potential so Yeah, it’s a bonus. If you already have a drone or out there. They should shoot some basic videos, but to me
photos usually will cover most of what buyers are looking for and if they’re a serious buyer they’re almost assuredly going to do a site visit anyway so you know video is only only going to give them so much more so I’m less concerned from that side whereas it used to be like a firm requirement and maybe even pay extra now it’s just less so
at this point, maybe that changes in the future here. So usually my default thumbnail that I like is a drone photograph with edited boundary lines for the property. And so that’ll be my base. Again, the main thumbnail that’s going to stick out and if I’m having the editing being done in house, then I
You know may ask for you know, three or four of the other Aerials to have boundary lines added again depends on the distinctiveness of the features if you know, sometimes we might do it on every photo that we get and Generally going to be aiming for 10 to 11 ish total photos and again depending on the features we might have
Some ground level shots, usually at least a few. So I’ll default usually to the majority of photos being drone photos. So the first five or six might be drone oriented photos. Again, the more complex the property, maybe we do more, maybe a little bit less. And then we’ll do ground level photos, trying to show out distinctive features. Okay, what is the…
road look like, assuming it has base frontage, if there’s an easement to it, okay, show the entrance to the property. Do we have a clearing set up for it, an area for a house? That can be a good target as well. Do we have available utilities to the property? Maybe pointing out where the power is, if it’s underground power, do we have water meter nearby?
Do we have existing septic, for instance? anytime those items would exist, then usually we’ll want to include that. Maybe there were other kind of distinctive improvements if there was existing fencing or again, like an entrance to the property, some type of driveway, if there was housing pad, any type of concrete foundation, et cetera. Shed, what have you, we’ll want to point out those distinctive features.
You know, if there’s possible negative as is features, usually we’ll include those in broker notes. Like if there was like old tires or trash on the property, I don’t want that being conveyed in a photo perspective. You know, we’re not, it’s not like we can hide that from.
before someone purchases the property, it’s just more of like that initial impression, okay, they’re interested enough to look at it, then yeah, okay, looking at broker’s notes or site visit note, yeah, there’s a couple of negative features, maybe we have to negotiate that down, but including that within the photos is usually not my preferred route to utilize, and a lot of brokers will agree with that type of strategy, so.
That’s just say another tactic to keep in mind. And then usually the last photo I like to include, you if I’m doing like roughly 10 to 12 photos total, people’s, you know, interest, you know, wanes really quickly. You can always try more, but that usually most people can get an impression of a property within that amount of photos. it’s again, it’s more complex than throw more in depending on the distinctive features. But then I’d like to just throw like a base aerial in.
whether that’s from land ID with boundary lines associated with that, Google Maps, if you want to draw boundary lines, what have you, or the county GIS. That’s another one just to keep in mind. So it’s just easier for people to keep in mind precisely where the property might be and the overarching scope of what
what the property may look like. So that’s our general strategy for most marketing photos that we will put up. And yeah, you really want to make sure, you know, it’s from a tactical side, whether it’s drone pilot or in-house editing, like make sure the color balance is appropriate. You can use AI to like really check in, hey, what’s like, how do you determine appropriate color balance? I know there’s a lot of great software tools out there.
that aren’t worth discussing kind of further here. can search for on your own, but yeah, like make sure your colors aren’t washed out and so forth. If there’s some seasonality involved too, like sometimes you buy a property and there’s no, you know, it’s not looking green. all, you know, it might be like snow on the ground potentially, or it’s muddy, there aren’t leaves growing depending what part of the country you’re in. So sometimes, yeah, you just have to get your property up and out there.
but you know, if the property hasn’t moved by the time foliage starts coming back to the property and you can get some nicer weather into spring season or have you, then it could be worth, sending drone pilot back out there again, to, get better quality photos plus, you know, it’s two birds with one stone of, you know, reducing some of the staleness as well. So sometimes we’ll do that.
we’ll check in with brokers routinely. Yeah, you know, people are kind of passing over the property now. Can you use an existing photo within the batch? Ideally, or, you know, do you, again, send out drunk pilot again to do a whole new batch that might be shot on a better day, better season, to freshen things up and get more eyeballs on the property as well. Cause I, you’ll, you’ll notice a lot of the times you
list a property within the first two weeks. Like that’s usually your biggest pop on a property after that, things start going stale pretty quickly oftentimes. So you just have to be mindful of when is it appropriate to try to change things up as well. know, some other tactics. Yeah. If there’s like nice improvements around the property, maybe you can take some photos of what, what, you know, next door neighbors or across the street might look like a new builds in the area.
that that’s a really good sign as well. Nowadays with the AI image generation, so long as it’s watermarked and sometimes there’s different regulations within real estate, I think they’re still working through this. Like you throw a AI generated house or improvement on the property and show people a vision of what the potential of the property could look like, assuming it’s oriented towards.
improvements on the property as a end use case. So that’s just another thing to keep in mind here. So yeah, hopefully a lot of these tactics help you. Again, take it seriously. You always want to put your best foot forward, but again, just remember by far price and characteristics of the property matter way more, way, way, way, way more than anything else that you’re doing.
marketing the property. Stand out, but look at some absolutely great trophy properties. Have terrible photos on them and still sell. So just be aware of priority when it comes to trying to dispel properties. Okay, that’s everything for today. SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs.
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