Bankrate follows a strict editorial policy, so you can trust that we’re putting your interests first. Our award-winning editors and reporters create honest and accurate content to help you make the right financial decisions.
Key Principles
We value your trust. Our mission is to provide readers with accurate and unbiased information, and we have editorial standards in place to ensure that happens. Our editors and reporters thoroughly fact-check editorial content to ensure the information you’re reading is accurate. We maintain a firewall between our advertisers and our editorial team. Our editorial team does not receive direct compensation from our advertisers.
Editorial Independence
Bankrate’s editorial team writes on behalf of YOU – the reader. Our goal is to give you the best advice to help you make smart personal finance decisions. We follow strict guidelines to ensure that our editorial content is not influenced by advertisers. Our editorial team receives no direct compensation from advertisers, and our content is thoroughly fact-checked to ensure accuracy. So, whether you’re reading an article or a review, you can trust that you’re getting credible and dependable information.
You have money questions. Bankrate has answers. Our experts have been helping you master your money for over four decades. We continually strive to provide consumers with the expert advice and tools needed to succeed throughout life’s financial journey.
Bankrate follows a strict editorial policy, so you can trust that our content is honest and accurate. Our award-winning editors and reporters create honest and accurate content to help you make the right financial decisions. The content created by our editorial staff is objective, factual, and not influenced by our advertisers.
We’re transparent about how we are able to bring quality content, competitive rates, and useful tools to you by explaining how we make money.
Bankrate.com is an independent, advertising-supported publisher and comparison service. We are compensated in exchange for placement of sponsored products and, services, or by you clicking on certain links posted on our site. Therefore, this compensation may impact how, where and in what order products appear within listing categories. Other factors, such as our own proprietary website rules and whether a product is offered in your area or at your self-selected credit score range can also impact how and where products appear on this site. While we strive to provide a wide range offers, Bankrate does not include information about every financial or credit product or service.
Phillip Spears/DigitalVision/Getty Images
Most homebuyers start their search for a home they like online. But can you trust the photos of for-sale homes you see on websites?
Maybe.
Most of the photos are actual depictions, but others have been digitally manipulated to portray properties in their best light. What you see online might not be the same as what you find when you show up at the house in person.
It’s unethical for realty agents to misrepresent a for-sale property, but there’s no national standard or set of guidelines as to what’s considered misrepresentation in photos.
Instead, what’s altered and what’s not comes down to the individual agent’s professional ethics, says Brian Balduf, co-founder and CEO of VHT Studios, a national network of real estate photographers in Rosemont, Illinois.
Making the grass greener or sky bluer or removing the seller’s garbage cans, holiday decorations, personal photographs or cat toys is OK, Balduf says. Editing out a fire hydrant or telephone pole or digitally fixing cracked concrete or damage to a home’s roof isn’t, in his opinion.
“We wouldn’t want to misrepresent a product we were photographing,” he says. “If buyers will see it when they come to the home, then you have to leave it in.”
RATE SEARCH: Ready to shop for a mortgage? Find the best deal today .
Share