Did anyone else stop hiring photographers for their rentals once they got decent at shooting themselves

The assumption doing the most work in your numbers is that days-to-lease measures photo quality when it mostly measures price.

Say two identical units list at the same time: one at $950 and one at $1,050. The cheaper one leases in seven days, the pricier one in eleven, and the only variable you recorded was who shot them. Your own caveat about market timing applies cycle by cycle too, because a unit vacant in April in Akron fills faster than one vacant in November regardless of the images. What your data does show cleanly is that your photos are not hurting you, which is genuinely the bar for residential rentals in a mid-tier market. Professional photography moves the needle most in the $1,800-plus monthly range where tenants are comparing four or five options on a screen before they visit anything. Below that, search rank, price, and response time to inquiries almost certainly account for more of your variance than any image quality difference.

The $730 payback math is solid on its face, but the real question is what the photographer's eleven-day cycles cost you in lost rent. At even $900 a month, eleven days versus seven and a half is roughly $135 in vacancy per cycle. Across eight cycles that is over a thousand dollars, which reframes the gear cost entirely.

What is your average monthly rent across those four units, and have you been tracking vacancy days against actual rent loss rather than just the day count?

The numbers you kept are genuinely useful. Eight cycles is thin for a statistical conclusion, but it is far more than most landlords bother to track, and the direction is consistent enough to take seriously.

Your instinct about price and location is probably right, at least partly. In a rental market like Akron, a tenant choosing between two similar units at similar rents will respond to photos, but the ceiling on how much photos move the needle is lower than it would be in a higher-competition market where listings are abundant and price differences are smaller. What your data more likely shows is that your photos cleared the baseline, meaning they were good enough that photos stopped being the friction, and something else, price, timing, listing platform, is doing most of the work.

That is actually a reasonable outcome for a landlord doing this for cost control. You spent $730, recovered it inside twelve months in saved fees, and you own the files permanently. For a four-unit portfolio that is a sensible decision regardless of whether your photography is exceptional.

The thing worth considering before you commit fully: your time has a value too. Ninety minutes on site plus editing is roughly two to three hours per shoot. If that time could earn you more than $175 somewhere else in your business, the math shifts. If not, or if you enjoy it, the current setup looks reasonable.

I cannot tell you whether your photos are actually good without seeing them, and I would not guess. Posting a set somewhere for honest feedback would answer that faster than any data will.

What does your current listing platform look like, and are you tracking where your inquiries are coming from?