6 Sites for FREE Real Estate Stock Photos in 2023
Maybe you’re a new real estate agent getting their Facebook business page setup, a cover photo, or getting your website up and running.
Chances are you need some good real estate pictures!
Fear not! There are plenty of free ways to get high-quality pictures for your every need!
Best Sites for Free Real Estate Stock Photos
Probably the easiest way to find free images is to simply Google them!
Well, not just any image. You need to make sure it is free to use.
In the Advanced Image Search, you can set the “Usage Rights” setting to different license statuses, including “Creative Commons License”.
The results feature many of the royalty-free images you’ll find from the below image vendors, but shopping them all simultaneously!
Flickr
Flickr can be a great place to find hyperlocal pictures of your area.
For example, I am a huge fan of getting pictures of road signs, city signs, and water towers like the one above. Your local website viewers know that it isn’t some generic stock photo of a home on the opposite side of the country. Instead, they get a personal connection to your area and burnishes your brand as a local agent.
Different pictures have different creative commons licenses, and you may still be advised to cite the source like how I did in the case of the picture above.
Unsplash
Unsplash has an assortment of high-quality, free real estate pictures. They have free images, public domain images, and creative commons.
Unsplash has an entire section just on HD and smartphone wallpapers if you are looking for a motivating, beautiful, and free real estate wallpaper for your computer or mobile phone.
Some images are premium images you have to unlock. But they have an excellent assortment of free stock images, too.
Pexels
Pexels has a large selection in which you’re almost sure to find a free stock photo that meets your needs.
In addition to stunning real estate pictures, Pexels also has free stock videos if you want to trick out your YouTube game.
Many of these are free, though they offer you the opportunity to donate to their creators when downloading.
Pixabay
Pixabay is yet another site chock full of free real estate stock photos, including some real estate agent images and artsy graphics.
Pixabay, like Pexels, monetizes its site by showing sponsored (not free) stock images from other sites like Shutterstock and Adobe Stock.
Canva
Canva is the much-beloved free image and graphics studio, great for making Facebook posts, blog art, infographics, and more.
There is not nearly the quantity of images you might find elsewhere. I see maybe a dozen free images to choose from for the keyword “house”. But they are right there in the editor ready for you to modify into the perfect Facebook cover or even postcard image.
Of course, you can easily import your other stock images into Canva to edit and add to them as well.
They also have free real estate related clip art.
Bonus: iStock
Hey! iStock is not free!
That is true, but they do give you free images each week when you sign up for a free account. They are a scattering of images and probably aren’t going to meet your immediate real estate needs, but it might be worth exploring.
And if and when you are ready to upgrade to professional stock imagery, iStock is where it is at. You can get a monthly subscription for a certain amount of credits.
They have not only photography but stock videos, audio, and illustrations as well.
When to Do Attribution
If you aren’t sure if you need to attribute or not, I would go ahead and do it.
Even if you don’t have to, it’s often a nice gesture to the sites and photographers who created and shared the content. Consider it as a thank you!
Here’s a good article on how to attribute images.
The short and sweet of it is:
<link to picture>, by <link to author’s page>, is licensed under <link to license type or information>
There are six different types of licenses with different rules. You can view all of those at the Creative Commons site.
CC BY is the least restrictive and merely requires attribution.
Touching Up and Editing
Now you’ve got your stock photos, but now what? Maybe you want to add your logo? Or superimpose your picture on top of it? Or add your name and brokerage?
The easiest place for free editing is the aforementioned Canva. You can probably do most of what you need there and at no cost.
I personally use and pay for Adobe Photoshop. I only use about 1/1000th of the tools Photoshop has, but it lets me easily resize images to web-friendly sizes, add my text, and quickly make transparent backgrounds.
Alternatively, you can consider hiring a professional from a real estate photography service like BoxBrownie. BowBrownie charges by the picture a one-time fee to do edits at your command. Their main service is retouching and editing your listing photos, but they have flexible plans for just about every photography need.
BoxBrownie
$1.60 per image. BoxBrownie doesn’t take your photos for you but instead offers a suite of services allowing you to enhance your real estate photos. They provide just about every other photography service you could want that doesn’t include anything on site, including adding virtual staging to rooms or switching a sky from day to dusk. Consider BoxBrownie if you enjoy taking your own photos but want help getting them ready for your listing.
Build Your Own Library
Hyperlocal photos make the best stock photography.
Photos of your own market are far better than the canned, groan-worthy stock photos everyone has already seen.
One easy way to start building a library is to see if your real estate photographer can snap a couple of photos of the neighborhood next time you send them to photograph a listing. Or offer to pay them something for the rights to photos they’ve already done around town. You get real estate photos of your city from a professional photographer!
Another benefit of doing your own photos is you can be sure to get it right! As a former Army Captain, it kills me how many stock photos show servicemembers wearing their uniforms incorrectly. Those stock photo models would be chaptered out of the Army if they showed up to formation looking like that! And yet those photos are everywhere in my military town! These advertisers are unknowingly turning off their target demographic with bad stock photos.
(Even I made that mistake when I accidentally used a stock photo of a German Leopard tank instead of an American M1 Abrams MBT. Embarrassing, though in my defense I was in the artillery, not armor).
Building your own library would avoid these stock photo fails.
Conclusion
These options didn’t always exist. There are some great real estate stock photos out there now that are entirely gratis! With a little bit of editing, you can make it your own and beautify your social media feed, website, and marketing.
Consider choosing photos or modifying them in a way that is consistent with your branding!
Updated April 15, 2023; Originally published March 15, 2019.
I do real estate marketing and I was looking for real estate stock photos. Thank you for sharing sources to real estate stock photos. Your blog was very helpful for me.