Listing Photos in Winter in Minnesota: When to Shoot and When to Wait

By Mariah Lowinske

If the house is going on the market now, shoot it now. Listing photos in winter in Minnesota can look great. I'd tell an agent to wait when the ground is brown and bare or the yard is turning to slush, and the list date can move.

I photograph Twin Cities listings all year, snow included. Here is how I decide when to shoot, what changes in winter, and how to get the house ready.

Taking listing photos in winter in Minnesota

Buyers shop in winter too, and the listing they see first is the photos. If your seller is ready, the house is clean and the sign is going in the yard next week, waiting around for spring costs you showings. Book the shoot.

A bright day after fresh snow is one of my favorite times to photograph a house. The roofline is crisp, the yard is clean and white, and the windows glow against it. Snow hides a tired lawn and bare flower beds better than any edit could.

Interiors don't care what month it is. A kitchen looks the same in February as it does in June, as long as the lights are on and the counters are clear. Most of a listing gallery is inside the house, so most of the gallery isn't affected by winter at all.

The weeks I'd rather wait

The hard stretches are the in-between ones. Late fall, after the leaves drop and before the first real snow, everything outside is brown and gray. Then there's the March melt, when the snowbanks turn black and the yard is half mud.

If you have to list during one of those windows, I'll still shoot it, and I'll frame the exteriors to show the house at its best. But if the list date can slide a week or two, it's worth asking me whether snow is in the forecast. A dusting the night before can change the whole front photo.

The other time to wait is when the house isn't ready. That's true in any season. Photos of a half-packed house stay on the listing a lot longer than the extra few days it takes to finish.

Short days and low sun

In December the sun sets around 4:30 in Minneapolis and never gets very high in the sky. You can check the exact times on timeanddate.com. That low sun throws long shadows across the front of a house for most of the day.

So I book winter shoots for late morning to early afternoon. That gives me the best light on the exterior and enough daylight to fly. If a home faces north, I'll tell you ahead of time that the front will be in shade and plan around it.

The dark afternoons do have one upside. Dusk comes early, so a real twilight shoot doesn't mean waiting until 9 at night like it does in July. My Dusk Shoots are $125 for real twilight exteriors. If a second visit doesn't fit the schedule, Virtual Twilight is $65 and turns a daytime exterior into a dusk photo in editing. I wrote more about that in How Virtual Twilight Helps Minneapolis Listings Stand Out.

Why the drone still goes up in January

Every real estate shoot I book includes aerials, starting with the Standard Real Estate Bundle at $285 for 20+ photos and 5 to 8 aerials. That doesn't change in winter.

Snow makes a lot easy to read from above. The edges of the yard, the driveway, the garage and the trees all stand out against the white. For an everyday, average-priced home, that one aerial is often what gets a buyer to stop scrolling and look closer. A lake home in January still needs to show how close the house sits to the shore.

Cold drains drone batteries faster, so winter flights are shorter and I plan them before I take off. I won't fly in falling snow or high wind. If the weather turns, we move the aerials to another day, and weather reschedules are always free.

Getting the house ready for a winter shoot

Most of the prep is the same as any shoot. Winter adds a few things to the list.

• Shovel the front walk, the steps and the whole driveway, edge to edge. A clean path to the door tells a buyer the house is cared for.
• Move the cars, including the one usually parked on the street out front.
• Pick up the boots, coats, salt bags and ice scrapers by the door. Entryways pile up fast this time of year.
• Take down most of the holiday decorations, inside and out. A tree in the living room dates the listing the day after New Year's.
• Turn on every light, inside and on the porch. On a gray day it makes a big difference in how warm the rooms look.

For the full room-by-room list, see How to Prepare Your Home for Real Estate Photography.

When a listing sits into a new season

Sometimes a house photographed in August is still on the market when the snow comes. Green trees and a summer lawn on a listing in December look stale to buyers who are shoveling their own driveway.

That's what the Standalone Exteriors / Seasonal Reshoot is for. It's $75 for a fresh set of exterior photos on a listing I've already shot, and it works in both directions: snowy exteriors for winter, or green ones once spring shows up. The interior photos stay the same, so you're only paying to update the part that changed. It's also the only ground-only shoot I offer.

There's also a quicker option, and I'll be upfront that it's my own app. The snowy photo at the top of this post started as the green-lawn photo of the same house below. I ran it through the Change Seasons tool in Virtual Listing Lens, which turns a summer or fall exterior into a winter one. You can try a free preview without signing up. If you use an edit like this, keep the house itself exactly as it is and label the photo as virtually edited, so buyers know what they're looking at. When I can get back out to the house, a real reshoot is still my first pick.

Questions agents ask me

Booking is in your agent portal. No card is needed to reserve a time.

AI-optimized blog post, overseen and edited by Mariah.