Take it with you
The whole checklist, on one page.
Every room in the house on a single printed sheet, with a box beside each line. Hand it to a seller, leave it on the counter, or forward it with a note of your own on top. Tell us where to send it and it lands in about a minute.
Why it is worth the evening
The photographs are the first showing.
Almost every buyer sees the gallery before they see the house, and plenty of them never see the house at all. What the rooms looked like on the day the camera came is what the listing is.
We are on the property for about an hour and we photograph it as we find it. Furniture stays where it is and counters stay as they are, so the evening before is where the gallery is really made. It is not a test either. Get as far as you get and tell us what you could not do.
The short version
The six that change the pictures most.
Out of everything on the list, these are the ones worth asking a seller for twice. The rest is on the printable sheet.
Turn every light on.
Interior light is what gives a room depth. Without it the same room comes back flat, and flat reads as smaller.
Open the blinds, the curtains and the shutters.
The windows are half of what a South Florida house is selling, and they are where the light comes from.
Put the personal things away.
A buyer needs room to picture themselves in it. It also keeps your seller's name and their mail out of pictures that go online at full resolution.
Take the pets out, and take their things with them.
Easier on them, and quicker for us. A bowl on the kitchen floor is the one thing in the frame nobody is buying.
Clear the counters completely.
The kitchen carries the gallery, and a kitchen only reads as a kitchen when you can see the worktop it is built around.
Every car off the driveway, and off the street in front of the house.
The front of the house is the thumbnail on every portal, and the driveway is part of the architecture the car is standing on.
The garage
Do not lose any sleep over the garage.
The door stays closed by default, so everything that comes off the kitchen counters and out of the bathrooms can live in there for the hour and nobody ever sees it. That one fact is what makes the rest of the list achievable. And when a garage does have to be in the gallery, we clear it afterwards. Drag the handle across this one.
When the house is ready
We can usually be there this week.
Photography, aerial, a Matterport tour and video, delivered the next day. You can see what a shoot costs on your own property in about a minute, without talking to anybody.