Young'uns.

All house tours looked like this in 2007. Matterport didn't exist, but the market was flush with "oh fuck get it listed before the money dries up" shots of half-eaten breakfast and unmade beds. With it came the "take pictures of everything don't ask questions" approach that landed things like former baptismal pools that are now showers on everyones MLS feeds.

This is actually a leading indicator, and people should pay attention: $375k for a converted church outside of Louisville absolutely warrants an emptying and some paint. In normal times you'd see the thing returned to neutral tones to emphasize the potential and preposterous amount of storage space. The mens' and womens' bathrooms would be brought to your attention to emphasize the utility for things like adult family homes, halfway houses and the like. 3000sqft of self-storage for some staging? Cry me a river that's like $1k for a couple months, including the van on both ends. And what are you storing? Cheap garbage. This is mercado break-bulk; someone who buys wholesale lots of, for example, girls gone wild DVDs, and goes through the excruciating task of selling that shit individually. He's moving because this is his one chance to get a decent sum for the place - it's been listed since January but expired in June.

It's also useful to know why we know about this: bored sararimen dreaming of getting away from their ZoomKids and moving out of their condos and into a place with some space. So they set the space filter high, the money filter low, ignore the hour-long commute to anywhere you care about and find shit like converted churches. And then they post it on Twitter. I've seen like five of these "weird" houses and the last time we all started sharing around weird real estate listings it was a harbinger of collapse.

Finally, let's talk about the disappearing images. This happens when people dig down to the local agent (Keller Williams Louisville) and blow up their bandwidth by looking at images. So KWL's sysadmin pulls the shots that are getting the most views because those are looky-loos, not buyers. KWL knows how many people are actually touring the house, and they know it's nowhere near the number of people looking at it - in a healthy market, those two things are correlated. There is no bad press. In this market, though, there are a lot of people disinterested in purchasing who are interested in observing. We've moved out of the sales channel and are in the spectating channel.