Finally! Toronto real estate listings will be beefed up with 20 photos on MLS instead of 9!

I’ve been harbouring a not-so-secret jealousy of the real estate boards outside of Toronto. You see, here we’ve been limited to uploading 9 photos of a home where elsewhere in our fine province, they’ve been able to go photo happy, saving Realtors from the pain and anguish of excluding that beautiful photo of the 3rd bedroom since there just wasn’t room. No longer!

Now we can show you all the goods. Did you know in some cities its common to upload a photo of the mechanics (the breaker panel, the furnace etc.)? They do this because they have so many photo slots to fill that they can. Wow. Imagine looking at that fixer-upper and knowing that indeed, the panel has been updated and the furnace is new. With so few characters allotted to us to describe a home, we can now show you these features and save the space to tell you what you can’t see. Some buyers could care less about the bathroom and just want to know that the house is sound.

This will, unfortunately, do nothing to improve the quality of the photos you see for some listings. For that you’ll have to hire an agent who gives a damn about selling your house for the most money with professional photography being part of the deal.

It also won’t force agents who for some reason can’t even be bothered to snap a photo of the front of the house to go further and include interiors. Then again, maybe some of them found the process of whittling down the photos they have to 9 so stressful they too will start to enlighten us with interior photos.

Like our clients, we aren’t offended by seeing a photo of an ugly room. We’d rather know what we are walking into. Photos help pre-qualify the buyers who come see the property. Imagine that.

I’m willing to bet that an unattractive house with good photos showing you what you’d get if you bought it gets far more showings than an attractive house with no photos. Since for many, no photos = must be awful. I’ll never know for sure as we aren’t willing to gamble on the sale of a client’s home like that. Here’s what else we do to sell a home,  soon with more than 9 photos!