Two-timing b*****d

A few weeks ago, I had an unusual thing happen to me in the course of a normal working day which placed me in a precarious and uncomfortable position.

I was working a Sunday - as is routinely the case - and shooting a quirky little cottage in a nearby Northumberland village for my biggest estate agency client. I set everything up as normal, did a quick shoot plan, and got cracking while chatting with the homeowners. In a few minutes, it became clear that they’d decided to market their home with two separate agencies. This isn’t necessarily unusual, but it generally occurs when the owner becomes disgruntled with the marketing efforts of the initial agent, and instructs a new agent to take over - usually once any existing contract period ends. I occasionally re-visit a property after a few months for a different agent.

This time, however, the second agent was also a client of mine, and I wasn’t aware of any instructions before turning up to shoot for the first agent. The owner wanted me to use the photos I was creating for both agencies, which simply couldn’t be done due to exclusive licensing agreements for each.

This caught me off-guard, and I felt that my only option was to shoot everything twice using different positions, lenses, and cameras so that the two sets of images looked completely different. The vendor was blissfully unaware of the uncomfortable position I was in.

I had to re-visit to shoot a second set of exteriors, and to decorate the cake I was never actually instructed to shoot the house by the second agent so couldn’t charge a fee for my troubles despite being hassled for the image delivery so they could compete with my original client who’d put their pictures online first.

It’s never happened before, and it’ll probably never happen again, but I still need a policy to deal with conflicting interests just in case. Most potential sellers would never dream of instructing multiple agents initially, but the probability is increasing as the market share of agents increases in my areas of operation. At the time of writing, both listings were still up there - side by side as the only listings in the particular village, and listed at the same asking price. It’s clear that the images were all taken by me, so it remains to be seen what my big client will think about this anomaly.

In the meantime, my guilt about professional infidelity persists.