One photograph is better than eight of somewhere else

There is a convention in property marketing that a listing must have twelve photographs. Where twelve do not exist, twelve are found: a stock kitchen, a generic terrace, an aerial of a neighbourhood that happens to be nearby. Everybody in the trade knows it happens and most buyers have learned to discount it.

We would rather not play. If a house has been photographed once, properly, the listing carries one plate and says so. If a shoot produced six frames, it carries six. What it will never carry is an eighth image of a building that is not the building.

What the convention costs

A padded gallery does two kinds of damage. The obvious one is the wasted viewing: somebody drives two hours to see a kitchen that is in another postcode. The less obvious one is that it teaches buyers to stop believing any of the pictures, which makes the honest ones worth less.

A listing is a statement of fact with pictures attached, not a mood board with an address on it.

What we do instead

• Every plate on a listing comes from one visit to that building.
• Where a second visit is needed, the listing says a second visit is booked.
• Scheme listings say plainly that the photographs show completed houses in the scheme rather than one plot.
• Context photography — a market, a shoreline, a street — lives on the market pages, never inside a property gallery.

The result is that some of our listings look thinner than our competitors'. We are comfortable with that, and so, in our experience, are the people who eventually buy.