Is it worth hiring a photographer when I'm the one selling my own flips

The Maple Heights comp is messing with your head and I get it, but one deal is not a pattern. I had the same thing happen, sold a Warrensville Heights property in 11 days with my phone and then spent $350 on photography for the next one in the same zip and it sat 40 days. The photos were not the variable. What was different was that the Warrensville one hit on a Thursday in March and the other launched on a Tuesday in November. Timing and buyer pool by season swallowed the photo spend whole either way.

The thing nobody talks about until it actually bites them at this price point is agent perception, not buyer perception. Buyers at $134,900 are mostly scrolling Zillow on a phone at 11pm and the compression those platforms use on images is brutal enough that the gap between your a6000 shots and a pro's work shrinks to nearly nothing at thumbnail size. But the buyer's agent, the person deciding which three houses to book for Saturday, they clock listing quality in about four seconds and at sub-$150k in Cuyahoga County a lot of them are already lukewarm on the commission check. Weak photos give them an easy subconscious reason to bump yours for something that photographs like it costs more. I dropped $275 on a Euclid property last year sitting at $119k and showings doubled inside a week, and I am pretty sure it was agent-driven traffic not buyer-driven.

Garfield Heights pulls a different buyer than Maple Heights, more Zillow scrollers than Facebook impulse buyers, and the thumbnail is the entire first impression on those platforms. At $134,900 your margin absorbs $275 without blinking, that is not the real debate. 19 days with mediocre photos in that zip, I would reshoot and relist before I touched the price.