We did a lifestyle photo shoot for our short-term rental

If you took your short-term rental photos on your phone and you're not a professional photographer, we need to talk.

There is NO BETTER INVESTMENT for your short-term rental business early on than a professional photo shoot. And you don't need to spend a ton, either. Your photos on Airbnb, VRBO or your own booking site are arguably as important as your reviews. If you have shitty photos, your property won't stand out. If your property doesn't stand out, no one will book it. If no one books it, well, you get the idea.

We invested in professional real estate pictures within the first six months of putting our short-term rental on the market. Having a professional take pictures made a world of difference. See Exhibit A below.

After about a year, we decided we needed more. Not more real estate photos, but some lifestyle photos. The real estate photos are the baseline - they show what guests can expect. But lifestyle photos tell a story to your guests and help them imagine staying at your home. They are also great content to repurpose for social media posts, blog posts, emails, etc.

Plan a lifestyle photo shoot at your short-term rental

Planning a photo shoot can be intimidating if you've never been behind the scenes at a photo shoot before. A good place to start is creating a mood board. A mood board is a visual collection of images you like and want to recreate. It can also be styles you want your photographer to emulate.

After I created my mood board, I added a shot list, which is essentially a list of the vignettes or scenes I wanted the photographer to create. This is essential to create for your photographer before the photo shoot. It helps them give you a better pricing estimate and keeps everyone on track at the actual shoot. The shot list also helps you plan what props you need to get in advance of your shoot. For our shoot, we already had a lot of the props we needed (beach towels, beach hat, books, games), but we also had to do a Walmart run to get a bunch of stuff (food, drink, candles [because we don't do candles at our short-term rental]).

I didn't end up getting all the shots on my mood board, but having it definitely kept the photographer and me on track the day of the shoot.

Finding a photographer

There are no shortage of family and portrait photographers out there, but it's harder to come by a lifestyle photographer. Brand content photographers are a new niche of photographers that are starting to pop up as more people become social media influencers and need quality lifestyle shots. They can be a bit expensive to work with.

Ultimately, I ended up finding a photographer who specialized in real estate and headshots/portraits. Sherri worked with me on each shot setup to make sure we got each one perfect. She even came to the house in two shifts to get dusk pictures and daylight pictures. It was an amazing experience and we're so happy with the results!