Is It Worth Adding People to Your Airbnb Photos? Trends vs. Results

I was talking with a good friend recently who used to be a photographer and he's also a short term rental owner and he was testing things on his properties and he added some very artistic photos to some of his listings and it boosted his search impressions and his reservations basically overnight. Welcome back to the show. I'm glad you're here again. Every week we've got quick, actionable tips for you, and I hope that this week is no exception. We've been getting asked a lot, should we put people in our photos? Is that going to help our search impressions? Are we going to show up more in search results on Airbnb and the different booking platforms? It might, but it might not. It really depends on how you do that. So I want to break that down this week. If you're new to the channel, thanks for joining us. My team and I have managed tens of thousands of guests now in properties across the states in my own personal portfolio and also a portfolio of properties that, that we are helping other owners to manage. And so that's been a fun journey. So thanks for joining. The first step, really behind any photo, and I just wanna break this down real quickly, is that we need to know who our guest avatar is, right? Who's actually staying at our property. And I've got a real quick tip for you on this one. If you haven't done this already or if you haven't thought of it, this can save you a lot of time. But basically all you have to do is as you go into your reviews, because this could be on any platform, right? Airbnb, booking.com, vRBO. Copy all of your reviews and paste them into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT what have my guests really enjoyed about my property? Name the top 10 highlights of the top five things that guests pointed out in my reviews. You may know these things already, you might think you know them already, but you might find something that surprised you in there. And the reality is, is that if these guests stayed at your properties and they left you glowing reviews and they went through the effort of actually noting this in your review, like, I love the fire pit outdoors when the sunset was going down, then these are the things that you want to highlight in your listing so that you attract more guests. Like that, right? And so, quick little tip, copy all of your reviews, go over to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to help you summarize those and come up with some tips. If you didn't know, we have an amazing ChatGPT document. It's a living breathing document that my team and I are constantly adding new prompts to. You can get it for free. If you go over strict, it can save you a lot of time with all kinds of things. So quick little tip there. First of all, we need to know what guests are staying, what types of guests are staying in our properties. And we want to set up all of our photos to attract those guests. The next thing that comes up, and maybe the reason you want to put people in your photos and that is to do something unique and to make your photos different. Different, because if you go pull up your neighborhood on Airbnb and you scroll through, I guarantee you that most of the listings are going to look pretty similar. They might start off with a pool shot. If they all have pools, they might start off with a nice shot of the living room or some space in the home. And so the whole goal here is to be unique and to be different. And actually the idea for this episode came up not just because it's super important, but I was talking with a good friend recently who used to be a photographer. Actually, I would say he still is a photographer and he's also a short term rental owner. He built a beautiful development and he was testing things on his properties and he added some very artistic photos to his. So they weren't just people in his photos. I'm gonna break down some good and bad with the people in our photos here in a second. But he is a photographer and so he had some really good skills. Not like a general real estate photographer where we wanna make sure the lighting's good, but he actually put in artistic photos in to some of his listings and it boosted his search impressions and his reservations basically overnight. So if you've got some good photo skills, try to think outside the box here. How can you incorporate some photos of your property in a more artistic way to where when someone's scrolling through all of the available listings, they see yours, yours stands out. Remember, people are just scrolling and scrolling now. Our attention spans are getting increasingly shorter and shorter. So that's the whole goal here. We want our property to stand out so that they click on it and that gives us the chance to get a new reservation. This also brings up the question, should we let AI be arranging our photos automatically? Well, maybe. And maybe in the near future we're not even going to have the option. What am I referring to here? Airbnb has a new AI sort your photos option. I found that it pretty much sorts them all the same way. It categorizes them into rooms and it's very likely we're not going to have the option to categorize them or order them ourselves in the near future. But right now I think these algorithms are still learning and they're maybe not doing the best job. So make sure that you've got the right cover photo and the right top five photos, you know, that people are going to see. We're going to talk real soon about conversions again. I'll break down a few more details, but until then, just take another look at your photos and make sure that you have your best photo first. Okay, here we go. Should we add people in our photos? So I want to go over the reasons how not to do this first. I was actually browsing listings recently in Medellin, Colombia, where I spend about half the year and have for quite a long time. And I noticed a lot of people showing up in the photos. So, yes, this is kind of trendy, right? People are like, oh, great, I can put people in my photos and it's going to automatically boost my listings. Well, not if you do it in the wrong way. So what do you not want to do? You don't want to have a picture of someone in all of your photos, right? You've got to ask yourself, is putting a person in this photo adding some sort of value to my guests? Is this attracting my guests more to my property or is it just showing someone simply in a space? I literally saw one photo where there seemed to be the Colombian owner just sitting there on the couch. And what was I thinking? I'm thinking, ah, I don't want to stay in this place. This is like, this is this Colombian dude's home. And I don't want to, I don't want to be in there. And so make sure, I'm sure you're not doing photos like that. But I did see, you know, good looking people, you know, that are just in every other photo and it's just too much. It's not really adding value. So that's the first thing. You want your guests to be able to envision themselves in the space and not some other guests. So if you're gonna add people in your photos, make sure you don't have too many people in there. Make sure they're discreet so it's not ruining the vision that your guest might have in your property. I would even go as far as say, don't show someone's face. You know, there's a really professional way to do this and we've seen it in marketing a lot in the past. You can look around you in all kinds of advertisements. There's lots of good ones out there that have people in them but aren't showing anything really personal. So if you're going to put people in your photos, make sure it's artistic. Make sure it's showing your guests a way that they could relax in a place where maybe they wouldn't intuitively envision that. Or maybe by adding someone in your photo, it helps. Helps to give a little more scale in your property. Maybe you have a massive great room or living room that's three stories, and by adding someone in next to the fireplace, maybe with their back turned to you and maybe a little bit blurry, someone can see the scale of that property and see, wow, this property is massive. So make sure, however you end up adding some in your photos, that it's actually adding some value. And so is this a requirement? Should you add people in your photos? No, you definitely don't need to. Right? In fact, there's probably a lot of other photos that you're missing right now that are much more important than adding some people in. So let's cover just a few of those. And again, we've talked about photos quite a bit before. And so if you've missed our prior episodes, head over to Strict. You can see all of our prior episodes. There's. And we also have the cool little bot. It's down in the right corner. You can just ask it, hey, Mr. Bot, what episodes? Have your photo tips and it'll break them down. It'll bring you to the right spot and you can also ask it whatever else you want. It's really cool. So, first one, aerial views. Do you have aerial views of your property? This is very often overlooked and it's really easy, especially now when we're getting our professional photos taken. Most professional photographers have a drone, so make sure you get some aerial views, even if it's not a 10,000 foot view, but maybe it's up right above the home and it's got a view of the backyard. Just to give a little more scale and set better expectations, really, for your guests. Having a floor plan. I talk about this one all the time, but that really helps your guests make a decision. Especially if it's a bigger home and they're coming with multiple families. Make sure you have a floor plan in there. Do you have sunset or evening or night shots for your property? These are really helpful, right? Obviously, if someone's staying at your property, they're not just staying there during the day. So have some night Shots where you can help them envision what it's like to relax in your amazing backyard next to the heated spa or next to the barbecue, or next to the outdoor television, you know, or whatever it happens to be underneath your outdoor lighting. Do you have a cool patio? Well, maybe this is a place you might want to put someone in one of these photos too. So I don't see as many people in night or evening shots, but that's a great place where you could add a little more value to an outdoor photo. So consider that before you decide to put people in your photos. Do you have a photo of all areas of your property? A lot of times I still see listings that have like 10 photos. You know, maybe it's a super small home, but you should have photos of local attractions and make sure you have photos really helping your guests see your property. This next one is a little questionable. So I've seen this done really well and I've seen this done very poorly. And that is a collage photo. So we know that most of our guests now are booking on their cell phone. They're booking mobile. So the majority of people are. And if you have a collage photo, especially as one of your top photos, then remember they're seeing that on a really small screen. So if you have five photos mashed into a collage, then they're probably gonna have a hard time seeing those. So just consider that. And consider if you don't have really good editing skills and you know, you can use canva and tools like that to create collages really easily these days, but if you don't do a really good job at it, it's probably gonna be a turn off. And I would leave a collage photo out if you just don't have the skills. Okay, one last quick one for you, and that is, should we add a photo of a review in our listing? So maybe there's something in your listing that your guests have said better than you could possibly write in your listing description. Or you just want to reinforce that, hey, my property is in the best location in this city. Well, you can add one of those reviews in there. My suggestions again, because most people are booking this on mobile. If you pack a review in there that's got 500 words, they're not going to read it. That's going to look really small. Right. So make sure if you are adding a review in one of your listing photos that you make it short. Maybe highlight the things that you want your future guests to see. So that's it in a nutshell, I hope that gave you a little more insight into photos. If you're considering adding people into your photos, just ask yourself, is this adding value for my guests? Is this going to help them make a decision? Or am I just adding a person in there? Because lots of people are adding people in there. So ask yourself that question with everything you put into your listing. Is this reaching my guest avatar, my ideal guest? And if the answer is yes, then by all means put that in there. And I hope your property continues to do really, really well. And I hope that you'll also continue to join us here every week. And so until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week and we'll see you back soon. Want to get on the fast track to financial freedom through short term rentals. What all starts with the properties you acquire. But you want to make sure that you acquire the right property properties. 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