HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Realtor headshots: what 762 realtors actually wear and use
Across 762 realtor profile photos in Coldwell Banker’s agent directory, 55% use a plain backdrop and 14% an outdoor setting with greenery. 50% wear a suit or blazer. 69% smile with their teeth showing, and 12% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop55%
- Outdoors, greenery14%
- At home14%
- Office8%
- Outdoors, street7%
- Other2%
- Light grey20%
- White19%
- Grey16%
- Dark grey10%
- Beige10%
- Black6%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (55%) and an outdoor setting with greenery (14%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often light grey, then white. Bright, light backdrops lead; the outdoor street shot is less common than you might think.
Clothing
- Blazer36%
- Blouse or dressy top28%
- Suit17%
- Collared shirt9%
- Sweater4%
- Plain top or T-shirt3%
- Black38%
- Navy14%
- White11%
- Blue10%
- Grey9%
- Brown or beige9%
Realtors most often wear a blazer (36%) or a blouse or dressy top (28%). Black leads the colours at 38%. Half wear a suit or blazer and half business casual: dressier than therapists, less formal than lawyers. Agents at one brokerage may follow a house style, so other brokerages could differ.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · Blazer22%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top16%
- Plain backdrop · Suit13%
- At home · Blazer5%
- Office · Blazer5%
- Plain backdrop · Collared shirt5%
Our Sales & real estate look offers the most common of these as styles to choose from, each labelled with how common it is, plus the realtors’ three most common colours.
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing69%
- Closed-mouth smile23%
- Neutral8%
- Chest up54%
- Waist up or wider26%
- Head and shoulders20%
69% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 57% face the camera square on. Realtors smile with teeth a little more often than therapists and far more often than lawyers.
12% are snapshots
Some realtors use a phone snapshot, a selfie or a photo cropped from somewhere else. On a directory where clients compare a page of faces side by side, a well-lit portrait is one of the few ways to stand out before anyone reads a word.
The realtor look, from a selfie
We built our Sales & real estate look from these numbers (dark blazer, bright light backdrop). Here it is on 4 fictional people, each made from one phone selfie.
Examples are fictional people, not realtors from the study.
How we measured
- We read Coldwell Banker’s agent directory pages in 10 metros (Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Columbus and Boston), keeping individual agents with a photo and leaving out team photos, in October 2026: 762 photos. Directory order is Coldwell Banker’s agent directory’s, so this is a sample of listed realtors, not a random one.
- Each photo was labelled by an AI vision model for presentation only: setting, clothing, colour, expression, framing, pose and whether it looks professionally taken. Backdrop colour was measured from the pixels. The model was told not to infer gender, race, age or identity, and had no field to record them. Labels weren’t checked by hand, so treat small differences with caution.
- We kept only the totals on this page. Names were dropped when the listings were read, and no photo, link or face data was stored.