For Sale: A Marketing Budget. Asking Price: Whatever It Costs To Photograph A Train Set.
John Durrant
28 Mar 2026
•7 min read
For Sale: A Marketing Budget. Asking Price: Whatever It Costs To Photograph A Train Set.
We shall start, if we may, with a statistic. Rightmove, in a moment of candour that has haunted this industry for over a decade, demonstrated that one photograph of a kitchen generated four times more enquiries than another photograph of the same kitchen. Not four times more than a competitor's kitchen. The same kitchen. Different photograph. Four times.
We shall pause here to allow that to settle.
Good. Now. Given this information, which has been freely available since 2013 and requires neither a degree nor a particularly long attention span to absorb, why do properties continue to appear on Rightmove looking as though whoever took the photographs arrived unexpectedly at half past seven on a Sunday morning, found the occupants still in bed, and pressed on regardless?
The answer, as with so many of life's persistent failures, is that nobody said anything. And in this particular case, the person who said nothing was the agent. Who also took the photographs. Who is now, in a very direct sense, the architect of their own misfortune.
The Vendor Who Forgot To Get Dressed, And The Agent Who Noticed But Said Nothing, And Then Took The Photographs Anyway
Here is a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in this industry. An agent attends a property to take the listing photographs. The master bedroom contains a full-size train set. The kitchen contains, in various stages of disassembly, what appears to have been a motorcycle. The garden, glimpsed through a window that has not been cleaned since the coalition government, suggests that nature is reclaiming what is rightfully hers.
The agent, mindful of the instruction, mindful of the fee, mindful above all of not being the person who told the emperor he had forgotten to get dressed, says nothing. Gets out the camera. Takes the photographs. Goes back to the office and uploads them to Rightmove.
The agent has now committed their own time, their own portal costs, their own staff hours, and whatever optimism remains in the office, to a determined attempt to achieve the same price as the beautifully presented property that sold three doors down in March. They will not achieve it. The sale stagnates. The vendor, a person of strong opinions and a long memory, moves to another agent. They explain to the new agent, and subsequently to everyone they know, that the previous agent failed to sell their property.
This is, on reflection, not the desired outcome. Particularly when the previous agent took the photographs themselves and therefore cannot, with any conviction, blame anyone else.
The Conversation That Needs To Happen Before Anyone Picks Up A Camera
Vendors are not, in the main, experts in property marketing. This is not a criticism. It is simply an observation. They are experts in living in their homes, which is an entirely different skill, and one that has produced, over time, the train set, the motorcycle, and the garden.
The estate agent is, or ought to be, the vendor's marketing department. This means taking control before the photography happens. Not during. Not after. Before. It means arriving at the property and saying, with the confidence of someone who understands what is at stake, that there are one or two things worth attending to before the photographs are taken.
Because here is the thing. When an agent takes the photographs themselves, the quality of those photographs is entirely within their gift. The camera is in their hands. The composition is their choice. And the preparation of the property before they press the shutter is their responsibility. All of it. There is no external photographer to instruct or blame. There is only the agent, the property, and the decision about whether to say something.
Say something.
The Things Worth Saying
They are not complicated. And rather than list them all here, we have done that already, in a preparation guide that covers everything a vendor needs to know and do before the photographs are taken. It is practical, unsentimental, and free. You can find it here. Give it to the vendor. Give it to the negotiator you are about to send out with the company camera. Pin it to the wall of the office if that helps.
The guide exists because the conversation needs to happen before anyone picks up a camera. Vendors who understand what is at stake are almost universally willing to make the effort. They simply need someone to explain it to them. That someone is the agent. Who is also, in this case, the photographer. Which makes the conversation not merely advisable but essential.
For those who require the numbers before they will act: enquiries can quadruple with superior photography. Research from the United States suggests that the best images increase the perceived value of a property by up to 12%. On the sale price of a family home, 12% is a figure that commands attention. It is, in many cases, considerably more than the agent's fee. It is certainly more than the cost of asking the vendor to move the motorcycle before Tuesday.
The Conclusion, Which Is Brief Because The Point Has Been Made
Photography is not a formality. It is not an item on the listing checklist to be discharged between the EPC and the floor plan. It is the marketing. The floor plan is a diagram. The description is sentences. The photograph is the reason someone picks up the telephone, or doesn't.
When the vendor has been properly briefed, and the agent arrives with a camera and an understanding of what good preparation makes possible, the results are: more enquiries, more viewings, more competition between buyers, a better price, and a vendor who does not subsequently explain to everyone they know that you failed them.
It is, when considered plainly, entirely within the agent's control. All of it. Which is either a comfort or a responsibility, depending on how one chooses to look at it.
We suggest the latter.
About The Author
John Durrant spent 37 years in estate agency before concluding, with the benefit of considerable experience, that the photography was the part being done most badly. He spent a further 12 years photographing country houses for the largest agency brands in the United Kingdom. He wrote the RICS Property Photography Guidance, which is the industry's standard reference on the subject and did not write itself. He founded Doctor Photo in 2012. He has seen the train set. He has seen the motorcycle. These days he reserves that training for agents who are genuinely serious about being the best in their market, because those are the only ones who will do anything with it. He has stood in a garden that had not made the acquaintance of a lawnmower in what the vendor described as "a while" and what the garden itself suggested was closer to a geological epoch. Over the course of that time he has trained more than 2,000 agents to photograph interiors and exteriors to a professional standard.
He would very much prefer that someone had a word with the vendor first. That someone, it turns out, is you.
For more information, visit doctorphoto.co.uk
John Durrant
28 Mar 2026
•7 min read
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