I'm a buyer and went to see a property based on the MLS photos, which showed it secluded and nestled in a bunch of trees. When I got there, there was no such thing and the neighbor property was right against it, towering over it.

I went back and it's clear they (they being Coldwell Banker Residential / Annapolis MD) photoshopped the pictures to remove the adjacent home and add trees to the picture where there weren't any. I wasted over two hours travel based on their deception and I emailed the president of the office about their poor ethics and asked him to explain themselves?

He admitted the photoshop and replied essentially there was no ethical violation, that the agent said she was just making the picture "balanced."

My question is, is this routine in your industry? Is that office and agent wrong, or is this truly a standard practice to doctor pictures like that? (If so... wow.)

(The one on the left is an undoctored pic, and the one on the right is the main one they use in the listing. On the bigger size one you can see where they copied over the trees from the right to add to the left, and removed the other building... it's listing #AA6988123).

[img]http://i30.tinypic.com/358p2br.jpg[/img]

The Realtor code of ethics requires truth in all advertising. You could bring this up with the local board of Realtors and make an ethics complaint - it would be up to the Ethics board whether or not to act on that complaint, though.

I don't know as I've ever "embellished" a listing in this way, although I've used Photoshop to remove trash in the yard (like dead furniture at the curb). Only once though.

What this agent did needs to be reported, and hopefully his/her association will administer appropriate punishment. I hate hearing stories about agent hanky panky and never knowing the outcome.

Coldwell Banker Residential / Annapolis MD.

Very unethical practices condoned by the president of this company. Report it to their local board. You might be able to report this on their local board website.

This is why shopping for houses on the internet is not as effective as people think it is. You probably did not look at a house that might have been perfect just because the agent did not have a good camera and the pictures looked horrible. It happens all the time. Here, agents will take a picture of the ocean and include it as if the view came from the house and not down the street.

Find a local agent who you can trust so they can help you with items like this before you make the drive.

Oh, and file a complaint against the agent and the broker. This was definitely false advertising.

I for one, apologize to you for having a bax experience with a real estate agent. There is one agent in my area who I wouldn't be suprised if he was doing the same thing. I would follow pikes peak suggestion, call your local board of Realtors. Please follow up with this! Too many people decide not to pursue it once a bit of work is involved.

I don't know about the ethics part of it. It would seem though that a personal visit like you said would make it apparent that the photo was photoshopped. I think such tactics would only infuriate a potential buyer though (as it has you). My guess would be that agent, broker, and company will be forever soured in your mind, its just not good business. I would have atleast appoligized to you and sent you a gas card to make you feel like your time was valuable.

I have several clients out of state that have bought properties sight unseen then call me to sale it for them. They are generally shocked when they see my pics vs the pics they used to make their determination to "invest". False advertising, misrepresentation??? I don't know, that would be for the courts to decide. Luckily you took the time to go see the property prior to it getting out of hand.

I agree with Bigtoe, find a local agent you can trust. If I was your trusted agent I would have seen the house and sent you my pics to save you a trip. You seem peed off enough I would also say file a complaint with the Local Board.

A photo used in advertising should be an accurate representation of what a person would see at the given angle, which was not true in this instance. But it is a little odd that the agent even bothered to photoshop, because just taking the photo at a different angle would have been true and not shown the neighborhing house.

If this incident is eating away at you, you could send a bill to the broker for your time and gas, "cc" the local board of realtors and mention that you will be referring your friends elsewhere. I doubt the broker will pay your bill, but he or she might be embarassed that a doctored photo triggered a complaint to the board.

As a tip in the future, you could explore Google Earth to get an approximation of how close one structure is to another, although their photos tend to be a few years old and so are not entirely reliable.

I think the practice of photoshopping MLS photos is rare -- but who knows, maybe it happens more than I know.

I photoshop all of my photos, but not to change what's there...I'll fix the lighting of the photograph and if there's a stray leaf on the lawn that distracts from the house I might make it "disappear"...But I certainly don't get rid of trees or BUILDINGS...geez...

Believe it or not, one of the local agents here in FL actually PAINTED the house...in photoshop... it was unpainted concrete block...and he painted it... (and at the verrrrry end of his description he wrote "house color is approximate after painting". What a dink ...)

Better even than Google Earth are the photos now being displayed by Microsoft's "Bing," especially when the image source is "Pictometry."
This is also the company being used by CC of late. I am amazed at how good they are.

What that agent did is unethical and is false advertising. As a professional real estate photographer I have strict rule on what we will and will not change in a photo. In general, if it is not part of the sale (Trash, leaves, garden hose, clutter) we can remove it. We will not do any structure changes to the property including painting, fixing holes in walls or doors, etc. Nor will we remove fix objects outside the house, (Light poles, wires, the house next door, etc). New contruction may have a transparent green wash placed over the construction dirt, but it clearly is not grass.

I would take and obivious misrepresentation such as this directly to your States Real Estate Commissioner and file a written complaint. It is at best a bad mistake and at worst it is fraud. Any intentional misrepresentation of material facts is fraud, even if you easily discover the misrepresentation.

I'm shocked not only at the lack of ethics (which was blatant) but also at the sheer stupidity of that real estate agent. What were they thinking? The moment anyone sees the actual property, they'll know the listing agent deceived them, and they won't trust a single thing that realtor has to say from then on.

I interpret that as a sign of just how desperate the sellers' market is right now, that people are stooping to those lows just to get showings.

Best of luck finding a non-photoshopped house,

_________________________
Brian
Free Rental Application

Obviously, this agent was way off base. Generally, I find it OK to remove something that is not always present. That means trash cans and heavy shadows can be removed, but the neighbor's house cannot be removed or moved. When it comes to adding trees, there is just no excuse for that!

I do not think that it is ethical to plant trees and change major thinks in the house look by photo-shop.

In the example that you wrote about there was a violation, ethical or not, it was definitely deceptive. In real estate there's always been the mantra "location, location, location"and now with the advent of the Internet you could now add "appearance, appearance, appearance" to the list of attractive attributes regarding properties for rent or sale.To Photoshop or not to Photoshop isn't the problem (in my opinion every digital image should be enhanced prior to posting online). The issue becomes one of enhancement as opposed to alteration.

When it comes to the subject of real estate photos and who should take them or not take them and what sort of adjustments should be made to the image prior to posting and, in general, the basic overall quality of the images that an agent or broker chooses to make available for all to see, there seems to be two distinct groups of real estate professionals: the first group that understands the importance and advantages of attractive and professionally presented images and the second group...not so much. In my experience there seems to be a greater number of real estate professionals in the second group and not the first. In direct contrast to this is the fact that I don't know of any real estate professional that would even consider the idea of putting up a less than professional appearing picture of themselves. A quick spin around the Internet will show site after site with a really great, flattering photo of a real estate agent on the same page as a property image that looks like it was taken by their six-year-old son who's been trying to get his Cub Scout merit badge in photography and hasn't quite met the Cub Scout standard (but it meets the standard of that particular website?).

Case in point: I had e-mail correspondence a short while back with an agent whose website I had found while doing some online research. This agent belonged to a very large and very well known national company. The particular listing that I contacted him about was being offered at $1.8 million, a very nice house in an exclusive neighborhood, it was a featured listing on his site. Again, the thing that struck me first was "hey, nice picture of this guy with his suit and tie" and then I looked at the main image for this particular listing...there it was: a crooked image of the front of this beautiful house with a hose in the yard, someone standing off to the left-hand side and a car parked with the left side tires in the grass and the right side tires on the driveway next to that morning's newspaper. I contacted him in a very professional manner and the response I got was much less than professional. Now, I can understand not wanting to incur the sometimes sizable expense of hiring a professional photographer but I don't understand the thought process behind the decision to post those images as they were in hopes of representing and presenting this beautiful property for sale.

I own and operate a service that puts me into contact with real estate professionals on a daily basis in regards to their online and print digital images. When I began this service I was really surprised by some of the requests that I would get from agents and brokers regarding the images that they submitted. At one time or another I've been asked to add, move or remove things like: doors, windows, chimneys, trees, telephone poles and wires...I was even once asked to "put a pool in the backyard" and someone even asked if I could "change the address"(???). With the help of Photoshop and a little experience all of these things are possible and would be undetectable. Images that are going to be seen by a prospective buyer should be Photoshop enhanced but not altered to the point that the image doesn't correlate to the reality.

Not only do I believe that it's okay to enhance an image prior to using it online or in print, I believe it should be a natural step in the process: take the image, enhance the image, post the image.

Even with today's fancy digital cameras, the images that are captured may not show accurate coloration especially when the photos were taken in a room where florescent and sometimes incandescent lighting is being used because of the yellowish hue that sometimes appears. One doesn't have to be a Photoshop expert to make corrections like this. There is a wide range of digital imaging software available, from the very expensive to the very affordable and even some pretty good free ones too. At the very least every image should be checked for proper color and contrast levels and most, if not all, could probably use a little cropping to help balance the scene. I also think that it's okay to remove objects such as a garden hose or a child's toy that was left in the yard.

An exception to the rule when it comes to enhance rather than alter is when we've been asked to, for instance, enhance an image of a kitchen that has Navajo white cabinetry and also provide images of the same kitchen with the same cabinets but in different colors; robin's egg blue, canary yellow etc. These requests generally come from home stagers and interior designers/decorators.

When it comes down to it, it's okay to improve an image by enhancing its existing elements and its not okay to edit an image by adding or subtracting anything that you couldn't add, move or remove when the picture was taken.

I personally always strive to show my listings in their true light, warts and all. Nothing is perfect, but the truth is always better. I have never photoshopped any pictures and feel that to do so to deceive a buyer, is dishonest and should be a breach of ethics.
Jeremy Moore,
Sales Representative
CENTURY 21 United Realty Inc. Brokerage*
Direct 705-931-0893
Office 705-743-4444
Email: jeremy.moore@century21.ca
Web: www.jeremy-moore.com
http://www.century21.ca/jeremy.moore
*Independently owned and operated. Not intended to solicit those currently under contact.

You mean you don't lighten poorly exposed pictures? You don't sharpen ones that are blurry? You don't color correct ones that are off color? Not doing so is doing your seller a disservice.

I can agree with you and Perky, Dont add, dont subtract, photoshop elements has saved me much time in only lightening and sharpening as I am not want/able to go back out and take a better pic. In some instances I couldnt if I wanted too. So how many of you have ever taken a zoom pic at highest resolution then photoshoped the exact area of defect by cropping. Man...I have lots of time to make the point to the Client or the appraiser/UW.

The only time I really "photoshop" beyond corrections mentioned above in my previous post is to use the clone brush to remove some distraction from the picture that does not normally belong there...

as in:

pieces of paper or some piece of clutter on a counter that can be removed, that was missed during the photo shoot

a reflection / flash in a mirror or window

a person or animal that happened into the edge of the picture

some other oddity that isn't supposed to be there

pictures and "stuff" on a fridge - that's the easiest photoshop fix ever! It looks so cluttered in a pic and so nice when its removed!

I don't like pictures with distractions in them. unfortunately some distractions you do not see until you upload the pics on the computer and you think "Doh! How did I miss that?" Thank goodness for the clone brush!

but I never use it to remove things like neighbor's houses, electrical wires, and other "permanent" and "unfixable" things.

I don't clone out wires...but I may crop tightly so they don't show in the picture. I also crop certain areas of a picture sometimes to show damage (for BPOs, not listings), such as a failing roof. I don't change features...but may lighten or do other edits to make a house look better. I will spend more time on correcting a photo for a listing than I will for a BPO (hey, they get what they pay for!)

Photoshopping trees into a yard is definitely not industry standard. I would regard that as unethical, actually. Listings should honestly reflect what a home looks like at the time of sale.

There's a difference between outright deception and good marketing. If you're taking the best possible angle of a building/room, who can blame you? Part of sales is convincing people they should buy something, but what they see should be what they get.

We photo shop a lot, but what we strive to do is make the picture show the home in the best light possible not make it look different than what it actually is.