Property Styling is “Packaging” for Home – Don’t Wrap it in Old Newspaper
To you it might be a beloved family home, filled with happy memories but in reality, it’s your product in a competitive marketplace. Your buyers are going to compare your product to all the others and determine how much they believe it to be worth. This is the most expensive thing you’ll ever sell – even a 5% loss will make a huge difference. If you consider selling your home the way you would putting a product to market, then your property stylist is your brand manager, and her work, your all-important packaging. There’s nothing like poor packaging to reduce the perceived value of a product and in this marketplace perception is everything.
The role of packaging and place in a good sale
Product packaging is a key part of the product mix. Packaging and point of sale marketing collateral positions your product in the buyer’s mind. It determines the perceived value of the product, the perceived benefits and it accentuates the physical appearance of the product. Your home’s “packaging” is the first impression – better make it a good one! Your styling in the home is your point of sale marketing – the front line of turning a shopper into a buyer. These are the two crucial stages of any sales process, and they make or break any product. When you’re selling a home, both these stages are in the hands of one person, your property stylist. Your real estate agent might be your sales rep but your stylist is marketing expert and sales is nothing without a market.
Determining your brand identity
Like any visual branding, your property stylist uses both her natural gift and her keen understanding of the market to develop brand signals to excite potential buyers. Like a “homemade” logo communicates “too cheap to hire a designer” providing a natural and lived in look provides buyers with a sense of “someone else’s ideal home, not mine”. Your home’s brand identity is about determining its unique benefits and assets (light, space, style, location) and understanding the desires of the market. A professional property stylist won’t just ship in the same look for every property, she’ll determine the best style to entice the best buyer. That means knowing the market and knowing her trade. Your property stylist is a marketing professional, not just a designer. The ideal property stylist will know exactly how to fit your product to market – which means using a broad selection of styling skills, not just putting the same pretty furniture into every home. Versatility and professionalism will make or break your sale price.
How the right property styling means more buyers at open homes
Your visual branding communicates everything about your brand in the blink of an eye. This blink happens while browsing open houses on the real estate pages. It happens on your home’s sign board, in the window of your agency, in shares on Social Media – it’s carried across multiple media and has only a moment to impress potential customers and draw them in to take the next step. In the property game, these are your jaw-dropper photos, the ones that “pop’ off the pages, boards and screens. How many interested buyers you get at your open home comes down to the photos. The more buyers, the better chance you have at a quick sales and the illustrious bidding war that ends in above asking price sales figures. Your home’s “packaging” is what gets them through the door, choosing your property above all the others open that day.
How the right property packaging turns open days into bidding wars
Property styling is like instillation art. Your buyer is immersed in a feeling, can sense the concept, can react based on instinct. Don’t let the instinct be to make a low bid. Like all point of sale marketing, it’s the final push, the last chance to take a potential shopper and convert them to a buyer. With your property however, it’s a totally immersive experience and every nook and cranny is under scrutiny. It’s a big investment after all. When your potential buyer enters your property, they need to sense the lifestyle they aspire to. They need to feel that they belong, that the property is “them”. This means setting an aspirational scene, appealing to their ideal self and reflecting their ideal lifestyle. A cut price styling job is nobody’s aspirational lifestyle. Nobody wishes they could live somewhere that feels cheap. By transforming the house from your home to their dream, you’re changing the market position of your product – to one that will fetch a much higher sale price. A good, strategic, creative property stylist will help you sell your home fast, with multiple bids and for more. It pays to invest wisely, after all, it isn’t “just a product” – it’s your financial future.
