This is going to be a fun game, I promise!

A colleague at another brokerage sent me the MLS listing for a house currently listed for sale, and the photos are quite possibly the worst thing I’ve seen this year.

When you ask yourself, “What’s the worst part about these photos?” there are FIVE responses that you could come up with, and I’d have a hard time making an argument against any of them…

Wow.

Is that for real?

Can it get any worse than “Pet Sweat?”

Perhaps.

In fact, I simply know it can.  Check it out:

Mmmmm…….yummy!

I thought that “Shredded Wheat” was good, as a child, perhaps with some hot milk poured over top.  But I can’t wait to try “Child Shredded Meat.”

Apparently, it’s a “delicious classic.”

If you like those, and you want to see about twenty others that are VERY risqué, then click HERE for the “26 Bizarre Food Name Fails” of all time.  It’s hilarious, yet childish…..yet hilarious.

But now that we’ve satisfied our childish need for day, let’s turn things back to real estate, and terrible real estate photos.

We know that there are tons of terrible real estate photos out there.

You need look no further than the glorious website, http://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/, whose creator might be the only person in the world more cynical than me.  If you want to kill some time, read through the photos and the captions.  You will actually “ROFL,” and, yes, I just supported the ridiculous acronym, “ROFL.”  Even I can’t tell if I was being sarcastic…

But those photos are from around the world, in different cities, at different times, and in completely different market climates.

That can’t possibly happen in the red-hot, ultra-competitive market of Toronto, can it?

A colleague of mine sent me a listing on Tuesday and said, “You gotta see this!”  The best part is – she was on vacation, and still found it so incredible, that she had to pass it along.

This house is currently listed for sale, and here the ten MLS photos that are online:

Here’s the exterior shot, which was clearly taken at 2am, during a city-wide blackout:

I wasn’t sure what this was, until I dropped my pen, leaned over to pick it up, and realized that this photo is sideways!

This is the same part of the house, but from a different angle!

This is what looks like two ovens in a bedroom…

This looks like a robot’s face if you’re really drunk.  Otherwise for you sober folks, it’s just a sideways photo of a bathroom…

This is what a puke-green wall looks like if you ARE drunk, and happen to be suffering from dizziness and blurred vision:

Even IF this photo weren’t sideways, it would still be of a wall, with an ugly paint colour, that has a chandelier blurring the photo:

Again, from a second angle….

If at first you don’t succeed…

And last, but certainly not least, we have another wall, but this one has holes in it…

And…..wait…..oh yeah….it’s also sideways…

Okay, so these photos aren’t nearly as bad as those at http://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/.

But this is a Toronto house!

I never thought that something like this could happen in the red-hot Toronto market, where the buyer-pool is so discerning, and where staging and marketing can make a 5-10% difference in the final sale price.

So let me ask you the burning question about those ten MLS photos: Which Part Is The Worst?

1) The fact that they’re blurry.

2) The fact that they’re sideways.

3) The fact that they’re of walls and floors, rather than rooms.

4) The fact that the house is ugly.

5) The fact that this property is listed not just by an active realtor, not just a broker, but a broker of record of a real estate brokerage.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

And I promise when I list your home, the photos will be at least slightly better than these.  I keep an old Nokia 9800 cell phone around strictly for taking real estate photos… 🙂