As a green-minded citizen of the world, I get all the reasons ceiling fans make sense. And they are great if you have big rooms with tall ceilings and are not selling your house. But as a Westchester County Home Stager I find they are usually listing photo poison; an absolute kiss of death if they are lighted ceiling fans.

It’s nothing personal…and The Refreshed Home is not part of any anti-ceiling fan cabal, it’s just science and math:

The eye is immediately, intrinsically, inescapably drawn to color and light. The more decorative the fan, the more it becomes the focal point of a listing photo>not the space itself>you know, what buyers are actually buying. And even with the best photographic equipment, they still visually skew a room’s proportions.

Average rooms are 8 feet tall; even low profile fans can protrude 8, even 10″ into a room, shrinking that dimension by roughly 12%. Add on a light fixture, you’ve got up to 18″ of visual real estate gobbled up; more if there are ‘decorative pull chains’ to contend with.

On paper, generous sized lighted ceiling fans seem a good bet with homeowners who have older houses with smaller rooms, fewer outlets and no central air, but they pay the highest price when it’s time for listing photos.

These prop plane nosecone look-alikes immediately communicate all the above-mentioned shortfalls, create glare and hot spots in the photos, while causing a viewer to wonder if a small plane missed a local runway.

Don’t put fear in taller, or high-heel wearing buyers. If you must have a ceiling fan-swap your tricked-out one for a simple low profile non-lighted one in white, so it disappears into the ceiling.

If you need to add light, one big honking fixture with 4-100 watt bulbs is not the way to go. Get several real lamps. Use them to define different areas, and draw viewers’ eyes to the further back corners of the room, adding oomph and balance to your listing photos.