When photography was new — to some agents

I won’t embarrass the agent from seventeen years ago, but I was looking at the history of a house that sold today, and came across its previous listing from 2004, when it had sought $3.475 million, and eventually got $2.2775. Here’s how she described it then:

DON'T MISS THIS ONE! COMPLETELY RENOV FROM HEAD TO TOE W/ALL THE BELLS & WHISTLES. OVER 2.3 AC PROFESSIONALLY LNDSCPD. OVER 5000 SQ OF LIV SP. WLK TO BTCC POOL. OVRLKS THE 1ST TEE. VERY PVT YARD SITS UP FROM THE RD AT THE END OF A CUL-DE-SAC. NEW KIT & BTHS & A COMPLETE MAKEOVER.

And above and below, here are the photographs that she used to entice buyers to pay almost four million dollars and to illustrate all that “complete renovation”. There were many reasons for David Ogilvy’s success over the decades, but certainly one of them is that he would never have let pictures like this go out over his name. This agent and her broker were not having a David Ogilvy moment when they put this up.