Photography

You can get "good enough Zillow" photos with a celly these days, truly. Gear gains you resolution and expanded post-production options, but the key is lighting the property properly.

Maybe you can try it yourself in your own house. Take your studio lighting, put it in optical slave mode and use your phone's camera flash to trigger them.

There are many outsourced firms in India that do all these kinds of photo retouching for a few bucks. Drop them off at the end of your day and they’re ready the next morning. Jewelry catalogs are done this way. Take a photo of a gold ring. It becomes 3 rings by shifting the colors. Gold. To rose gold. Etc.

I’m a realtor (worked in different States) and 99% of professional agents (those who sell more than 5 homes a year and take some pride in their work) use professional photogs. These photogs are not the highest level because we have time constraints. We have to get 20-50 pics within 24 hours. So editing is not that elaborate. And photographing + video takes about 2 hours for a 3,000 SF home, that’s the most we get.

You can tell if photos are iPhones because of the angle limitations, it’s not easy to shoot every room in full with a phone. Lighting in interior shots is also an issue. And most agents are TERRIBLE, you can tell when it’s iPhone pics.

Been doing this for a while and I can tell u that, no, there isn’t a magic app everyone knows about.

I can also tell u that at least in the luxury real estate game realtors are not taking their own pics. Think about how amateurish the realtor will come across to the home owner if he /she took photos of the house with his iPhone for the actual listing?

You know, some realtors are also photographers themselves...

Also, how do you know they aren't paying someone to take the photos for them? There's no way you know that unless you're going around asking agents since listing photos are almost never watermarked.