MY MATE SAM surprised me the other week when I called round to his house.
He was outside washing his car. I’d never seen him doing that before. In fact, I’d said in the past that his car looked like it had never seen a wet sponge.
“Everything okay, Sam?” I asked him.
“Yep. Just washing the old jam jar,” he replied.
“Must be a first.”
“Second, actually. I washed it when I first bought it second-hand, three years ago.”
Sam explained that he was selling his car on Autotrader. And he wanted to try to get close to the £6,500 he was asking for it. “If clean cars didn’t sell,” he explained, carefully lifting the wipers from the windscreen, “car showrooms would be full of dirty ones.”
True.
“I’m having some proper photos taken as well,” he went on. “Dealers know what they’re doing.”
He’s right, of course.
Shine to sell
Now more than ever, thanks to Instagram and similar apps, we’ve become more and more accustomed to seeing slick shots of clean, well-presented, well-photographed items up for sale. From cars to clothes, bikes to bags to baby buggies, it’s the ones that look best online that sell fastest.
It’s stating the obvious, really. When clean and well-presented, used goods can look like they’re almost new. And you only have to look at the likes of Amazon to know how much we love new things.
What smart salespeople are doing when they buff up their second-hand goods before photographing them from the best angle is mimicking what sellers of new things do. They’re packaging them as pristinely as possible.
Glossy looks
It’s the same story with bricks and mortar. Look at any property portal, or any estate agent’s website, and the homes you’ll linger on longest are the ones that look like they’ve been prepared to appear in an interiors magazine.
Indeed, ‘edited’ isn’t a bad way to describe homes ready for buyers. Everything that isn’t needed has been edited out. Dirt has been washed away.
Clutter has been chucked. Fusty furnishings flung, books banished… box after box after box of ‘stuff’ has been transported to a shed, a garage or a charity shop.
In a world where high-res, filtered images are the norm, property shots must really pop to retain interest. There’s an internet full of other, shinier options vying for buyers’ attention if yours don’t warrant any ‘likes’.
Oh but, you might say, what about old properties? They retain attention.
Old properties that keep browsers glued to the screen are those that have been well looked after. They might have been built a couple of hundred years ago, but they’ve retained at least some of their original features – what they had when they were new. Impressive fireplaces. Transom and sash windows. Bougie boot scrapers.
Tumble-down barns only really interest those who can breathe new life into them – to create something fresh as well as distinguished.
Make buyers swoon
Remember, buyers always have the luxury of choice. If the photos they view online don’t cut it, they’ll move on to the next one. Then the next one… To generate a lot of enquiries and increase the likelihood of higher offers, buyers are most interested in really spick bricks.
***
I saw Sam again recently. He got £6,250 for his car. “£250 more than I’d have taken,” he said, smiling.
That’s around 3.8 per cent of the asking price. The same percentage of your average £300,000 property is over 11 grand. That’s well worth bearing in mind when it comes to considering whether it’s worth paying for professional photography to market your next property.
Please drop me a line if you have any questions. I’d be happy to chat to you about your next project.
Let’s create content with even more kerb appeal.
– Lucas
07956 155 899
Photo: Alexas/ Pixabay