Exhausted Buyer Says Real Estate Listing Photos Use Wide-Angle Lenses And Twilight Filters To 'Catfish' Buyers, But They Just Waste Everyone's Time

After months of clicking through real estate listings and coming away disappointed, one buyer from the Real Estate subreddit boiled it all down to a single plea: "Agents, please stop doing this with listing photos! (signed, every exhausted buyer)."

They weren't vague about the problem. "I've been scrolling listings for months and I swear I can tell, purely from the photos, whether I'm about to see a normal house… or drive 40 minutes to get catfished by a ‘spacious' 9×9 bedroom shot with a lens borrowed from NASA."

That set the tone for what turned into a pointed takedown of every bad photo trend buyers are sick of. The issue isn't just awkward angles or weird lighting. It's trust.

"When a listing is good, it feels like the seller/agent is saying: ‘Here's the house. Come see if it works for you.' When it's bad, it feels like: ‘Here's a magic trick. Don't look behind the curtain.'"

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So what actually makes this buyer book a showing? Natural light that looks real — not the "twilight vampire" set where every window glows radioactive. Staging that helps with scale, not style. A floor plan that shows what the photos don't. And a logical photo order that tells a story instead of scrambling the sequence for no reason.

Then comes the dealbreakers.

If a listing has 28 photos but none of the kitchen, they assume the kitchen is either "mid-demolition," "a time capsule from 1972," or "technically a suggestion." Same goes for garages and basements. "Ugly is fine. Hidden is not."

Excessive angles of a single bathroom also signal problems. "If I've seen the toilet more times than I've seen the living room, we have a problem."

And when every surface is glowing and the walls look like they've been dipped in neon? "I'm not thinking ‘wow.' I'm thinking ‘this is going to feel very different in person.'"

The buyer's bottom line: "Deceptive listing photos don't ‘market' the house. They just waste everyone's time." And if the first thing a buyer says when they walk in is, "oh… it's smaller than I thought," that's not a win. That's a disappointment created before the tour even started.

In the replies, photographers and fellow buyers backed it up. One user said, "Close-up photos of the furniture. I'm not buying their furniture, I'm buying the house." Another added, "There's one listing with AI-staged photos that shows rolling meadows through the windows. The actual view is a parking lot full of trucks."

A working photographer shared that many agents won't pay for floor plans or even include them in public listings. Others request only 15 "best" images, even if they're provided with dozens. "They'll regularly say no," the photographer wrote, "even when I offer to add a floor plan for $20."

The core complaint is simple: buyers aren't asking for glamour shots. They're asking for honesty. As the original poster put it, "Just open the curtains, let the house look like it does on a normal Tuesday."

Buyers aren't the only ones feeling the squeeze. Homes are taking longer to sell than they did just a few years ago: in November 2025, Redfin data shows the typical U.S. listing spent about 53 days on the market, up year‑over‑year as inventory builds and buyer activity remains soft. 

In a market like that — where buyers can scroll dozens of listings before pulling the trigger — it's easy to see why some sellers and agents lean on flashy photos to stand out. But as this exhausted buyer insists, tactics that mislead don't sell homes — they waste everyone's time.

For people who want exposure to real estate without the headaches of touring — or getting sidetracked by over‑edited photos — there are alternatives. Fractional investing platforms like Arrived let everyday investors buy shares of rental homes and earn passive income from real estate equity without having to sort through listings or book tours. It's a different path into property that doesn't depend on dazzling snapshots or clever angles.

Others are exploring new ways to participate in home equity itself. Nada's Homeshares, for example, connects investors to portions of home equity and residential portfolios, giving access to a slice of the nearly $35 trillion U.S. home equity market without direct property ownership. 

Because for many buyers right now, the real value isn't in another polished photo — it's in something that actually performs.

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