Are Professional Rental Listing Photos Worth It? What Institutional Landlords Already Know

The big institutional single-family landlords professionally shoot 98 to 99 percent of their rental listings. A little over a decade ago, almost none of them did.

That number came from Kori Covrigaru, CEO of Planomatic, when he came on my podcast. His company shoots photos, floor plans, and 3D tours for rentals nationwide, and he’s spent 22 years in listing media. If you’ve ever wondered whether professional rental listing photos are worth it, or had an owner push back on the cost, this conversation gave me a much better answer than “trust me.”

Full disclosure: RL is a Planomatic customer, I’m an advisor, and they’re a Crane partner. I tried hard to keep this from turning into an ad, and most of what follows applies no matter who you hire.

The institutional playbook: shoot everything, standardize everything

Kori made a point I hadn’t fully thought through. The big operators (Progress Residential, Invitation Homes, AMH and the like) own the homes they manage. There’s no “will my owner pay for this?” conversation, because they are the owner.

He compared it to his years shooting for real estate agents. Every so often an agent would sell their own house, and “you better believe they ordered everything on the menu.” When it’s your own asset, you buy whatever shortens days on market and raises the price. For an institutional landlord, every single home is their own home.

The second difference is standardization. An institutional client picks one package (number of photos, floor plan or not, AI virtual staging or not, even the shot list) and runs it identically in Atlanta, San Diego, and Las Vegas.

Most of us in third-party PM do the opposite. We decide property by property, often based on what each owner agreed to pay for. Fifteen photos here, twenty there, a 3D tour on this one but not that one. Kori said bigger PM companies standardize more, but smaller ones are mostly “onesie twosie.”

And the institutions don’t decide on gut feel. Kori was blunt about it: “There is no gut feeling, there is no what do we think.” Each of them has run its own numbers, and Planomatic has done studies with John Burns Real Estate Consulting and ShowMojo. The findings point the same direction: fewer days on market, higher rent, and more booked showings.

If the most data-driven operators in our industry shoot 98 to 99 percent of their homes, that’s a pretty good hint for the rest of us.

The $1,000 rule, and the Zillow filter that hides your listing

I asked Kori a practical question. Say your sister-in-law owns a rental and her PM wants her to pay for professional photos, a 3D tour, and a floor plan. Does she need all of it?

His first question back: what’s the rent? Based on the ShowMojo research, any rental above $1,000 a month warrants professional photos and a 3D tour. (Planomatic’s 3D tours include a floor plan.) In a tight market, or for a higher-priced property, he’d say absolutely yes.

Then he described a demo his team runs at conferences. Someone from, say, Las Vegas walks up to the booth. They pull up Zillow Rentals and run a search, which returns roughly 2,000 listings. Then they click the filter to show only listings with a 3D tour, and the count drops to under 500. (His numbers were rough, but you get the idea.)

The question to ask: where do you want your rental to show up?

This is the part that clicked for me. Photo quality matters, but whether a renter sees your listing at all matters first. I see the same dynamic on social media. I post on LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and each platform pushes different formats at different times (video one month, carousels the next). Knowing what each platform wants has a disproportionate impact on how many people see my stuff, regardless of how good it is.

Zillow works the same way. If they put a big button on the search page for 3D tours, some product manager there is trying to hit a number. Let their goals work for you.

One caution from Kori: the ILSs test new layouts on users all the time, so what you see today may change. Go to the ILS, pretend you’re a renter searching in your market, and look at what it promotes.

AI virtual staging is the closest thing to a silver bullet

This was the most surprising part of the conversation. Kori said AI virtual staging is “the closest to a silver bullet marketing point that I’ve seen in our industry in the 22 years.” Staged listings, in his words, are “flying off the shelves.”

Traditional staging rarely pencils out for rentals unless you have a high-end property. AI virtual staging costs a fraction of that, and Kori says the data shows it moving listings faster than professional photography or even 3D tours alone.

His theory on why: fifteen photos of empty rooms, all the same color, give a renter no frame of reference. Add a dining table, a couch, and a TV, and they start picturing their family eating dinner in that room.

I’ve felt this myself. After we moved out of our old house, a stager came through, and I went back to look. They’d turned the table the other way and put the couch somewhere I never would have. The house I’d lived in for 10 years looked better than it ever had. Real life has book bags, dishes, and toys everywhere. Staging lets you fantasize for a minute, kind of like checking into a hotel.

Kori expects the next step to be renters moving virtual furniture around inside the listing itself, built into the ILSs. That doesn’t exist natively yet.

What Kori would skip: listing video and Matterport

Kori sees three categories of listing media that pay off: photos, floor plans, and 3D tours. He left video off the list on purpose.

“To me, video was kind of dead on arrival,” he said. He hasn’t seen data showing that a listing video (AI-generated or a real walkthrough) leads to more showings or fewer days on market, and the ILSs don’t give video a prominent spot. He knows some of his friends in the industry disagree. He does see a place for video to build your brand on TikTok or Instagram, or as move-in condition proof. He doesn’t see it paying off as a listing tool at scale.

The Matterport story is a lesson in platform risk. For a while, Matterport tours looked like they’d take over the world. Then CoStar (which owns Apartments.com and Homes.com) bought Matterport, in the middle of its long-running fight with Zillow. As Kori tells it, once a media agreement between Matterport and Zillow expired, Zillow stopped accepting Matterport tours. In his words, that’s when Matterport “sort of died” in single-family rentals.

PMs who had invested heavily in Matterport suddenly couldn’t use those tours on the site that sends most of their leads. Planomatic moved its customers over to Zillow 3D, which it shoots with a 360 camera to build an interactive floor plan with a walkthrough.

Kori was careful here and suggested checking the legal details yourself. My takeaway: when one platform drives most of your leads, its business decisions become your marketing strategy, whether you like it or not. It’s crazy to me there weren’t lawsuits over all that stranded equipment.

For more on how Zillow keeps changing the rules on rental listings, read The Zillow Squeeze: How Standard Features Keep Becoming Paid Upgrades.

The bottom line

The institutional landlords figured out years ago that listing media pays for itself, and they proved it with their own data. Third-party PMs can borrow the playbook: standardize a package across your portfolio, use the $1,000 rule to decide when it’s worth it, give Zillow what it’s promoting, and test AI virtual staging before you spend money on video.

Full episode here: