Present2Sell - Your Time Summer 2008
Selling a property in a cautious market? No problem!
There is some common ground, in interior design terms, between presenting a property for a client to sell and preparing a scheme that a client will live with. For example, creating a focal point in the garden by echoing the colours inside, is something that can provide delight to the home owner and be attractive to a potential buyer too. The main difference between the two approaches is that interior design is a lifestyle investment for a homeowner to enjoy whereas home staging is a business investment to make the most from selling a valuable asset, your property. As a designer, it's my job to help owners be objective and to quickly identify problems.
Selling or renting out a property in the summer, when South Devon is at its most appealing has clear advantages over making the same attempt at other times of the year - even though, at the moment, the market is quite cautious. The current situation has even discouraged some would-be sellers from putting their house on the market altogether.
If, however, selling is for you, there is plenty that can be done to give your property the edge over the others which buyers will be sizing up. It's often difficult for sellers to don “buyers goggles” and make an accurate assessment of what complete strangers will see when they walk through that front door. Not only what they see but also what they sense. We take in and process a fantastic amount of information and often, our emotional response is so far ahead of our reasoned one, that we find our minds are made up before we really understand how it happened. We arrange our homes in ways that fit our lifestyles and we become accustomed to our personal environment filled with our personal things and the memories they have for us. When we need to sell, it often helps to rely on someone else for objectivity about the impact of all this on others.
Homes are as individual as people. This kitchen dining room
was getting a lot of negative feedback from viewers who came to the property. As you can see, the dining table juts uncomfortably into the cooking area. The clients had considered many complicated and expensive solutions but all that was needed was a new layout. I did a dimensioned floor plan for space planning purposes, and defined the kitchen area with a new counter top and lighting. The house sold four days after going back on the market.
At the other end of the spectrum, this flat had been empty for almost a year
and although plenty of people had been to look at it, no firm offers were made. Empty rooms can be as hard to feel comfortable in as cluttered ones so in this case, the work was to make it looked lived in and give viewers an idea of how the space could be used. Working within my cIient's budget, I chose artwork, colours, furniture and accessories to appeal to the sort of people most likely to buy that type of property. After arranging and dressing it, it sold within a month.
My key pointers to successfully presenting a property are to get the basics right; cleaning (especially windows) and remedial work comes first. Colour comes next. Use pale neutral colours on large areas, and preferably the same neutral throughout. To avoid blandness, use accent colour with a harmonising colour – the smaller the area, the more intense the colour. Use no more than 3 colours, and never use a colour just once in a room. Last of all, choose objects than only fit with this scheme – remember less is more - less clutter is more space!