Terrible estate agent photos

Anyone who's ever trawled property selling websites, or even the flatshare ones, will know how important it is to see a good set of photos...

...and how wrong the people selling or renting out a place will sometimes get it.

This beauty, which ingeniously employs a racy red basque and a tray of champagne in an attempt to sell the rather dull looking flat, was the spark for a very funny feature by Jamie Merrill all about the phenomenon in today's Independent.

Bad estate agent photos is quite have quite a blog following – maybe you've seen the brilliant US site behind the photo below (not also a bad a Coca Cola advertorial, surprisingly). Others have sprung up too, including the very entertaining Terrible Real Estate Photographs Tumblr. But these focus more on the sorts of places that appear in the "before" sections of property TV shows, rather than the marvellously over-confident over-styling of that sexed up boudoir up top.

In the Twitter conversation on the topic flying around on Friday afternoon, the photo below also emerged. Don't you just want to cosy-up for the evening in one of those wipe-clean sofas?

Also highlighted was this arguably unwise foray into magazine-style description of a "charming" 300-year-old cottage for sale – all first-name familiarity with the owners and talk of how "the Aga is smashing" plus a room by room, shade by shade breakdown of the "feminine charm" exhibited in their Farrow and Ball colour scheme. Marvellous stuff.

Read the full story in today's Independent. You can also ogle some horrors at Ugly Houses and Terrible Real Estate Photographs.