Notice to Realtors

Now, I'm not saying we're moving and we're certainly not building. I just like to look at house plans. That's one reason I subscribe to Southern Living.

Sometimes I'll see a neighborhood that looks interesting so I'll check out houses for sale there. Sometimes I think about where we might live when we retire so I'll check houses there.

Realtor web sites are giving a lot more information than they used to. There's more detail about the houses and usually a lot of pictures, although the quality of those pictures is iffy.

So here are a couple of suggestions for realtors from someone who looks at your web site the way some customers do, particularly those who are visually oriented and like to see how everything fits together.

1. One empty bedroom tends to look like all the other empty bedrooms. Get some variety in those photos. Pictures of the exterior (front and back), inside the garage, decks, patios, storage sheds, view out the front door, closets, floors, kitchen appliances (especially the range and frig), basement or attic storage, etc.

2. Something I'd really like to see: floor plans. They don't have to be fancy architectural drawings or even drawn precisely to scale. Just the general layout that customers can compare to the photos to get a better of idea of what is there.