Selling your home? Avoid these staging mistakes.

Kate Ziegler had a laugh when she saw a listing photo for a spacious suburban home with a centered Palladian window.

While the photos were clearly taken in the middle of winter — indicated by the coating of snow on the treetops and backyard — the snow-laden front yard had been digitally edited to appear bright green with dotted snowflakes interspersed over it.

“They just took a snowscape and threw some grass over it on one section of the lawn, and called it good enough,” said Ziegler, a realtor with Arborview Realty in Boston.

That certainly wasn’t the first time Ziegler has spotted a bad edit on a real estate listing photo. There was the artificial-looking sunset filter featuring jewel-toned skies slapped on a photo taken at high noon, or the house where all the outlets had been photoshopped out. In a digital world, photo editing and virtual staging are tremendous tools that can help take a listing’s photo from meh to marvelous in just a few clicks. But a heavy-handed edit can lead to your listing going viral for the wrong reasons — and send your potential buyers to some other open house.

Consider the way you feel when you see a heavily edited photo of a person on Instagram or Facebook. In the same way, a photo of a house that has gone through excessive enhancement tends to strike prospective buyers as suspicious.

“Listing photos are more important than ever for sellers, since so much of the house hunt happens online,” Ziegler said. “They get to a house in person and they go, ‘Well, this doesn’t look anything like what I expected.’”

Agents will sometimes take photos of a property themselves as a means of saving money on a photographer. That’s a mistake, said Sarah Maguire, principal of the Aranson Maguire Group at Compass, who notes that prospective buyers always notice a bad iPhone photo.

“I’ve seen absolute disasters. If you’re a broker, you should be paying for professional photos and special editing,” Maguire said. “You can tell from a mile away when something is not done professionally. Even if it’s the nastiest place, professional photography does help.”

While subtle retouching doesn’t hurt, Ziegler said it’s better to get great professional photos rather than relying on excessive editing. Using the correct lenses, angles, and lighting goes a long way. “We want it to feel like what people expected when they walk in the door,” she said.

Sometimes, it’s what isn’t removed from a listing photo that has the biggest effect on the potential buyer’s opinion. Maguire said simple mistakes — like a toilet seat left up or a prescription pill bottle sitting on the bathroom counter — convey an air of carelessness. Kitchen counters and bedroom dressers filled with items take the attention off the property’s features and onto your clutter.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen photos with dirty dishes in the sink,” she laughed.

Maguire uses a checklist to get listings prepped for photos, everything from removing shampoo bottles from the shower to clearing away cobwebs.

“Half the battle of our job is getting a place show-ready. And that sometimes does not come easily,” she added, noting that a few family photos are OK to leave around the house if you’re comfortable with the internet seeing them.

When it comes to furry friends, some realtors are comfortable with showing a family pet in listing photos, as it might encourage prospective buyers to imagine their own dog or cat curled up by the fireplace. But there’s a sharp line between a single pet and three cats wandering through your listing photos.

“I love when animals are included in photos,” said Meg Grady, an agent with Lantern Residential/EastieLove. “As long as it’s staged, not just a blurry dog walking through.”

Political flags and signage can be another issue. Agents want their properties to have the least amount of personalization as possible in the hopes that it will cater to a larger net of prospective buyers. But that can get complicated when existing residents display signage, particularly when it’s political.

“Under freedom of speech, you have to tread very lightly about asking people to remove signage. During the last election, I had a multifamily building. One unit had a peace sign, and one had a Trump sign,” Grady said. “We couldn’t ask one person to remove theirs and the other not to, so we very sensitively said there should be no signage of any sort draping from the building.”

Too much seasonal decor in photos also can signal trouble. While holiday decorations might make a spot look extra cozy, the time window that it’s applicable is slim. The same goes for anything that makes it too clear the seasons in which the photos were taken.

“If you’re heavy on mums and fallen leaves and the house is still on the market in March, then people will be like, ‘Well, why is this still on the market?’” said Jess Harrington of Finessed Home Staging. “If you pull the listing and put it back on later, it doesn’t actually look like a new listing. It looks like a listing from last fall.”

If there’s a glaring issue with the house — like a blighted property next door — agents are generally in agreement that disclosing the downsides of a home upfront is ultimately a service to the prospective buyer.

“At the end of the day, you want them to come and look at it, but you don’t want somebody to feel like you pulled the wool over their eyes,” Grady said.

Ziegler said she also operates from a perspective that more transparency is best.

“You can find the right buyer for anything, if you price reasonably,” she added. “Not every house needs to be everything for everyone, but you need to be, in my opinion, honest about what a house is and who it’s good for.”

Megan Johnson can be reached at [email protected].