What buyers actually look at in your listing photos

01

The numbers, and what they are actually from

Two reports are worth knowing about, both from the National Association of Realtors, both from 2025. The Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers asks buyers what they used. The Technology Survey asks agents what they use. They are the closest thing this industry has to a straight answer, and they do not always agree with each other, which is itself useful.

From the buyer side, and the exact wording matters here: Exhibit 3-8 of the Profile asks buyers who used the internet during their home search how useful each website feature was. 81% said photos were very useful, which put them first. Detailed property information came second at 77% and floor plans third at 57%. Agent contact information was 44% and virtual tours 38%. Videos ranked lower still.

That ordering is the part worth sitting with. The two things most often sold as the upgrade, video and the virtual tour, finish behind the plain photographs and behind a floor plan, which is one of the cheapest things on the list.

From the agent side: 52% of agents reported using drone photography or video, and 46% reported using AI-generated content in some form. Both of those were up enough to be worth noticing.

Read those two together and the picture is not complicated. Buyers decide on photographs. Agents know it. The competition on any given listing is therefore not whether there are photographs, it is whether yours are better than the ones on the listing above you in the results.

02

The first five frames do most of the work

Nobody scrolls a listing the way they scroll a gallery at an exhibition. They look at the thumbnail, they open it, they swipe four or five times, and somewhere in there they decide whether this is a house to look at properly or a house to close. Everything after that is confirmation.

So the order matters more than almost anyone treats it. The frame that should lead is whichever one answers what kind of house this is fastest. On a Palm Springs mid-century that is usually the elevation, because the architecture is the product. On a La Quinta home backing a fairway it is the back, because the view is what the price is for. On a Cathedral City three bedroom it is often the kitchen, because that is the room the buyer is pricing against the one they have now.

I deliver galleries in a running order rather than in the order I shot them, and it is worth a minute of your time to check it against what you know about the buyer for that street. You know that market better than the camera does.

03

Frame count is the wrong thing to optimise

The question I get most is how many photographs a listing needs, and the honest answer is that the number matters far less than people think. A listing with twenty-five strong frames outperforms one with forty where fifteen of them are a hallway from three angles.

What a buyer is doing in a gallery is building a floor plan in their head. Every frame that helps them do that earns its place. Every frame that repeats one they have already seen makes the house feel smaller, because it reads as padding, and padding reads as a house with nothing left to show.

For most valley homes under 3,000 square feet that lands somewhere between 25 and 35 images. Bigger properties need more because there is genuinely more to see, not because the number should scale.

04

Floor plans are the quiet one

57% is the statistic agents underuse. It sits behind photos and property details, but it is ahead of everything else in that table, including virtual tours at 38%, and it is the one that costs the least to fix.

The reason is the same as the frame count reason. A buyer is trying to assemble the house in their head, and photographs give them rooms without giving them the relationships between rooms. A floor plan hands them the thing they were building anyway.

It matters more here than in most markets, because valley homes sprawl. A single level with a casita, a courtyard entry and a separate primary wing is genuinely hard to read from photographs alone, no matter how good the photographs are.

I draw them as a $100 add-on to a listing shoot, measured on the same visit so there is no second appointment. You get the 2D plan with room dimensions on it and the same home drawn as gross living area, which is the version an appraiser asks for. Of everything on the add-on list it is the one I push hardest, because it is the cheapest line on it and the only one more than half of buyers have said out loud that they want.

05

Where the drone earns its money and where it does not

Just over half of agents now use aerial photography, which means it has stopped being a differentiator and started being an expectation on the listings where it belongs. The trick is knowing which those are.

An aerial earns its place when it answers a question the ground cannot. How big is the lot. What backs onto it. Where does the house sit relative to the mountains, the fairway, the wash. If a buyer would form a genuinely different impression of the property after seeing it from sixty feet up, shoot it.

On a flat interior street where the lot is standard and the neighbours are close, the aerial is a photograph of a roof, and a photograph of a roof in a gallery of good interiors makes the gallery worse. I will tell you which one you have before you pay for it.

06

AI, and the line I will not cross

46% of agents reported using AI-generated content, and the question I get is where the line sits. Here is where I put it.

Sky replacement, virtual staging and day to dusk conversion are all fine, because none of them changes a fact about the house. The sky was blue last Tuesday and will be again. The empty room is still empty and the floor plan has not moved. I flag every edited file at delivery so you know exactly which ones need the digitally enhanced note in your remarks, because most boards want it and the ones that do not will.

What I will not do is remove something that is actually there, add a feature the house does not have, or generate a photograph of a room instead of taking one. A buyer who drives out to Indio and finds the pool smaller than the picture does not blame the software. They blame the agent, and they are right to.

The useful way to think about it: editing should change how well the house photographs, never what the house is.

07

What this means on your next listing

Shoot for the first five frames, not for the frame count. Get a floor plan, because more than half of buyers want one and almost nobody provides one. Use the drone when the lot or the setting is part of the sale and skip it when it is not. Disclose the edits.

None of that is expensive and none of it is clever. It is just the difference between a gallery that gets a buyer in the car and a gallery that gets scrolled past, and on a listing that is most of the job.