Photos on Thursday with the trades still in the driveway, or wait until Monday

The early Thursday is the version that eats my week, and I'll say plainly why: it costs me time I don't bill for. I'm working around a painter, I'm shooting one room three times waiting for someone to step out of frame, and the 3D scan is the worst of it because a scan with a missing appliance can't be patched. I have to redo the whole floor.

So my rate card now has a $75 line for shoots where the house isn't vacant and finished, and about a third of my flipper clients pay it without blinking because they want the Thursday. That's a fair trade. What isn't fair is expecting a free return trip.

If you want the Thursday, keystone, book it and price the reshoot in from the start. You'll stop treating it as a failure.

Your punch list is the actual problem here, not the calendar. On my last two I moved the paint touch-up and appliance hang to the day before media instead of the day before closing, and it cost nothing except telling my guys the order changed. Media day became the deadline for the house being done, which is what a deadline is for.

The truck in the driveway is a text message. The range hood is two hours.

girder has it right in principle and it works maybe 70 percent of the time. The other 30 percent is a backordered part or a subcontractor who ghosts you for four days, and then you're standing in the room deciding on the spot.

For those, what I do for repeat clients is shoot everything, deliver everything, and hold two frames. Listing goes live with 26 photos instead of 28, and nobody counts. Then I swap the two in when the hood shows up, usually on a day I'm already within ten minutes. I don't charge for that swap because it's twenty minutes and it buys me the next eight shoots. The 3D scan I will not do early, though. Cobalt is right that a scan doesn't patch.

Question from the cheap seats: does the listing platform care when you swap photos in? I've read that changing a listing resets something in how it sorts or shows as new, and I can't tell if that's real or something agents say.

@plumb it varies by MLS and by portal, and some feeds treat a photo change as an update to the listing and some don't touch the sort order at all. You'd have to ask your local MLS what their rules say, because there's no single answer across markets.

On keystone's actual question, I do this on the rental side every month and the finished-and-empty version wins for me. A unit that photographs as half done gets me showings from people who then walk in and see a finished unit and are pleasantly surprised, which sounds nice and is actually a smaller pool showing up. The photos set who bothers. My four extra days of vacancy cost less than the wrong four applicants.

What strikes me reading this is that the $58 a day carry is the only number anyone here can actually put a figure on, and it's the smallest one in the thread. Four days is $232. The reshoot is $95 to $150. Those two are close enough that the real question is the one nobody can put a price on, which is what an unfinished photo set does to a buyer's read of the house.

keystone, do you have any listing where you shot finished and any where you shot early, on similar houses? Even two data points would beat this.

Having been the guy asked to move the truck: it's not the truck, it's that the driveway concrete is covered in drop cloths and my compressor is on the porch. Ten minutes of moving stuff and I'm behind on my own day. Nobody ever budgets that ten minutes as a cost, but it comes out of the trades and it shows up as a slower finish.

Voted for finished, mostly because of what trellis said about who shows up. Also, I'm about to be the person listing these and I'd rather have one clean set than manage a swap I have to explain to a seller.