We all know that your property photos will play a major part in whether or not a potential buyer will pick up the phone to book a viewing for your home.
And obviously enough, a well-presented home will be more appealing to people browsing online than an empty one, and an empty home will be more appealing than a poorly presented one. For a quick summary and a few examples, watch our video.
We’ll come back to badly presented homes another day but assuming you’ve already moved out and your home is empty or almost empty, does that mean you’ve lost all chance of getting the max number of inquiries? What are your options for taking photographs of your home in it’s current condition? Well, you have three options:
- Leave it as it is and just give it a clean and a tidy, or
- Hire in furniture, either just for the photos or until you sell, or
- Add furniture to your images electronically.
For most people, Option 2 would be expensive, time-consuming, and possibly a bit of a hassle finding the right professional to take on such project. But it’s worth noting that in the super-prime property market, agencies will include a staging package for empty properties at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds because they know that good furniture will make all the difference to buyers.
Of course, we’re not in the super-prime market and if your home is worth less than let’s say £2m then you probably don’t want to spend £30k – £50k staging it.
So you could look at Option 1 and leave your home looking clean and tidy, but how often do you look at a picture of an empty room and think ‘is that the lounge, or a bedroom?’ Do you really want people to have to flick between images and the floor plan and/or description to be able to work out which room each image relates to? No, that’s making them work too hard and there’s a good chance you’ll end up losing their interest.
Option 3 is a good middle ground – add furniture electronically. It’s relatively quick and cheap, and while it may not have all the variety I’d like, it’s not used often enough for that to be a problem, and the quality is getting better and better.
Take the image below. What is that room? A lounge? A bedroom?
No, it’s a dining room.
Once in your empty home the viewer will be able to see the size of the rooms and how they could be used. They can refer to your marketing if they want a reminder of how much space a bed would take up, plus if they want to put the bed in a different position it’s easier to imagine without having a physical bed in the way.
For more information please contact us on 020 8364 5418 or for a couple more examples please watch the video.
