Occupied Rental Photography: What Property Managers Need to Know
Shooting a vacant home is easy. A vacant home does not have to be scheduled around. A vacant home does not have to have personal property in it when it is being photographed.
Occupied rental properties are a different job entirely.
These differences affect how you shoot and process photos of your rental property. If you're a property manager or rental owner looking to market your occupied rental property, it will definitely impact the quality of your listing photos and lead to quicker rental of your property.
Tenant Communication Changes Everything
You will need a key and to have confirmed an appointment to take photos of a vacant home.
The biggest challenge for occupied properties is that the tenants are living there. Tenants have many legal rights regarding notice before entry. In Arizona for example, for non-emergency purposes, a landlord must provide at least two days' notice before entering a rental unit. This legally required notice will dictate your scheduling for the shoot.
Your communication before the shoot is more important than you might think. Why? Well, for a start, it is easier to get someone to agree to something if they understand fully what you are asking of them. Secondly, communication before a shoot will help to prevent last minute cancellations, incomplete preparation and generally a less than cooperative tenant on the day of the shoot.
Decluttering Is Harder to Control
In vacant homes, we add staging to the empty rooms. In occupied rental properties, however, we work with the already existing furniture and the personal items of the tenants. The biggest variable in occupied properties is how the tenants maintain the home while it's occupied. Some can prepare the home perfectly for a photo shoot, while others won't budge and leave everything as is.
Since tenants maintain their space so differently, property managers and owners need to set clear, written expectations for how to prepare a home for a photo shoot:
- Clear kitchen and bathroom counters
- Remove personal photos and documents from visible surfaces
- Store away excess furniture, boxes, or clutter
- Make beds and tidy living areas
- Move vehicles out of driveways and garages
However, any amount of preparation of an occupied property is better than none. When a photo is published online of a property occupied by renters, it can and often does give potential buyers and renters lots of concerns and impressions. Many can form first impressions of a home's condition by viewing pictures online. Whether you list your rental property or not, the same impressions can be left online for anyone to view. So, remove clutter, clear floors and carpets, vacuum, organize furniture, and take pictures when property is being prepared for occupancy and listing.
Privacy Considerations Require Active Management
This also introduces a number of privacy risks. These risks exist as well when we are shooting vacant homes, however, with vacant homes, there is less of a chance of inadvertently including a tenant's personal property. The risk of inadvertently including a tenant's personal property in shots of an occupied home is very real. For example, a tenant's personal mail, prescription bottles, family photos, children's toys and/or belongings, and even financial documents that have been left on a desk.
Personal information that would identify a tenant needs to be removed from photos prior to publication by both the photographer and the property manager. These images can be used to expose a tenant's private information causing harm to them. The photographer and property manager can prevent this from happening by going through the images to remove any identifiable information that could potentially be used to identify a tenant prior to the images being published.
Protecting a tenant's privacy requires active management. Before you even think about editing and publishing the photos from the occupied rental property, it is your obligation to review the images for identifiable personal information. Many aspects of the occupied home can be removed from the background of the wide-angle shots before you start editing the photos. Any remaining personal items should not be recognizable.
Scheduling Requires More Lead Time
Schedule an occupied rental shoot with plenty of time to spare. We recommend booking your photographer as soon as you know the move-out date, since you'll need to coordinate three parties: the property manager or owner, the tenant, and yourself.
Well-run property management companies have procedures in place for the turn of rental properties and will book photographers for shoots in advance, as part of a larger process of preparing the home for the market. For example, one firm, Earnest Homes, handles this through a structured 'Rent Ready' process of preparing rental properties for the market, a process that outlines the various steps that need to be taken to prepare a home for rent, including preparing the home for photography.
Preparing for the market ahead of time creates a rental-ready home in the shortest time possible and allows for optimal marketing as soon as the lease has ended. Time lost in between just means an empty home costing you money.
Lighting and Layout Challenges Are Amplified
Furniture in an occupied home is arranged for everyday living, not for photos. The residents have put the biggest piece of furniture in the living room against the wall to get the most room in the living area. Their bed might be blocking the room's best window. There are lighting fixtures in the ceiling but they are not providing enough light for a good photograph and may not even be working because they have been turned off by the resident.
It can be difficult to move around in a small house, so within the constraints of the existing setup, photographers have to find ways to work with the existing natural light, shoot from the most advantageous viewpoints, and highlight the strongest features of a room.
Dim or mismatched light fixtures that work fine for daily living rarely hold up under a camera, so photographers often need to bring in supplemental lighting or lean on flash and long exposures to compensate. Residual lighting from equipment can wreak havoc on photographs shot in poorly lit rooms. The widely-acknowledged difference in architectural and domestic photography means that even experienced photographers treat occupied homes as a separate type of shoot.
The Bottom Line
Property managers who treat occupied rentals as part of a process of preparing a property for marketing in the same way that they would a vacant property get better listing photos and shorter vacancies as a result.
Build your rental photography strategy around the tenant, not just the property, and it shows in the finished photos.
Ready to Book Your Rental Property Shoot?
Valley View Photo serves property managers and rental owners across the Phoenix metro. Book online or reach us directly at 602-341-3123.
