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Listing agents might lead with their best picture of a home’s exterior, but most don’t linger too long on the outside.
Photo galleries in home listings include more pictures of bedrooms, than of any other room type. The kitchen and living room photos are featured nearly as prominently, despite there being only one of each in a typical home.
These findings were the result of a study, released Wednesday, by researchers at Homejab and Restb.ai. Using a computer-vision technique, the companies trained machines to look for patterns in digital images from home listings. These patterns were then used to classify more than 14,000 listing photos by feature type.
“When you scroll through listings of homes for sale online, typically, you see an exterior shot,” Homejab founder and CEO Joe Jesuele said in the report. “But that’s not the most popular photo that real estate photographers capture.”
After bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms, the most common listing photos were of bathrooms, the front exterior and dining areas, respectively.
The seventh-most-popular type of shot was an aerial photo. A surprisingly high 4.3 percent of all photos studied were shots of the home taken from the air.
The study’s method identified more aerial shots than it did photos of yards, backs of houses or home offices.
“It will be interesting to see if these numbers change over time — especially with the increased accessibility and use of drone footage for aerial photography and video,” Jesuele said in the report. “And because of the pandemic, will we see more photos of home offices in the future? Time will tell.”
The study also identified common home features that agents and the professional photographers they work with, aren’t as eager to highlight.
A mere 1 in 80 listing photos were of a basement, and even fewer featured a home’s garage. A minuscule share of photos were of front doors or staircases.
Photos of hallways and laundry rooms — while a bit more popular than these options — were near the bottom of the overall list as well.
A few features stood out for their relative popularity in listings, despite the fact many homes don’t have them. If a home has a patio terrace or deck, there’s a pretty good chance it features prominently in the home’s listing gallery. One in 26 listing photos displays one of these two features. Patio terraces were the 10th-most-popular feature in listings, and decks the 13th most used.
Swimming pools were less prominent, accounting for roughly 1 in 90 listing photographs.
Here’s the full list, according to Homejab and Restb.ai.
Most common features in photos of homes for sale
- Bedrooms — 11.9 percent
- Kitchens — 11.90 percent
- Living rooms — 10.8 percent
- Bathrooms — 9.8 percent
- Front exterior — 8.7 percent
- Dining areas — 4.5 percent
- Aerial shots — 4.3 percent
- Yards — 3.0 percent
- Back exterior — 2.5 percent
- Patio terrace — 2.1 percent
- Home offices — 1.8 percent
- Laundry rooms — 1.8 percent
- Decks — 1.7 percent
- Hallways — 1.4 percent
- Foyers — 1.3 percent
- Basements — 1.2 percent
- Garages — 1.1 percent
- Front doors — 1.1 percent
- Pools — 1.1 percent
- Stairs — 0.9 percent
- Walk-in closets — 0.7 percent
- Uncategorized photos — 16.4 percent
