Knowledge = profit
I don’t know where else but property you could turn $20K into $500K in a matter of weeks, with minimal risk.
And deals like this don’t happen all the time, but they do happen.
I’m talking about a recent sale in Brighton, Victoria.
It was on the market for several months without a bite around the $3.5m mark.
Then the owner went with a new agent, and the property sold in two weeks for north of $4m.
And what did the new agent do? Spent $20K staging the place well, and took a new photo.
I’m making it sound a bit silly, but it’s not all that far from the truth.
This was the hero shot from the original campaign:
It’s not bad right? The didn’t do a ‘bad’ job.
But then check out the hero shot from the new campaign:
It’s almost hard to see what they’ve done (pruned back the trees and shrubs, added a little light along the path). But the vibe is completely different. It’s gone from Grandma’s house in the woods to a bright and spacious period home.
And the hero shot matters. It’s the first point of contact for potential buyers, and it’s what anchors people’s expectations around the price.
The agent, Joel Fredman, sums it up:
How important is a picture to draw people in? It’s incredibly important. Everyone has quite a short attention span as it is. They need to fully engage and enjoy the house from the first moment they see it online.
In this market you’ve got to impress people from the very first time they see it online. Then carry that through to a wonderful walk-through. They have to be obsessed. They have to click on the listing and share it with people.
A house can be on the market and sitting around and people don’t click with it. People can just go, “There’s that old thing again”, but they hadn’t really seen it because they discounted it. They’d seen it but not engaged with it.
Of course, you can’t just take a great snap and sit back and relax. You also have to follow it up with the walk-throughs.
In this case, that meant spending an extra $20K to revamp the furniture and make a few cosmetic adjustments here and there:
They’d done a partial styling but it just wasn’t the right styling for the house. The cheap and cheerful approach to things does not work, especially in this market. We were making some changes. We even painted the staircase white. It was dark wood and felt dark as you walked in.
The takeaway in all this for me is just how valuable the right expertise can be. The first campaign for this property wasn’t bad. The styling wasn’t bad. The photo wasn’t bad.
But it wasn’t amazing either. And if you want an amazing price you have to deliver amazing.
And to do that, you need to know what you’re doing.
DB