Blog - New Interior Solutions

Improve your real estate listings in two easy ways

The best real estate agents are those who do everything they can to list their properties in the best way possible. They make sure their homes are clean, well furnished and without major flaws. In addition, they also ensure that their listings have accurate and attractive professional images that help increase the visibility of the house or the condo they are trying to sell. But what else can they do to improve a listing and therefore differentiate themselves from the competition? In my opinion, there are two things they should focus on.

1. Embrace new technology and apply it to real estate
Today more and more agents are using virtual tours to represent a property. The benefits that these offer are many, however the main one is to immerse the visitor in a virtual reality that accurately reflects the real world. With a virtual tour the buyer can literally walk inside a house and see not only all the rooms but also the flow from one room to another, which is something that a photo, static by nature, cannot transmit. This, as a result, generates serious and qualified leads.

2. Put the new technology in the foreground
Although it is undeniable that virtual tours are an innovation at the moment, they are of little use if they are not displayed in the right way. Too many times I have seen real estate agents request a virtual tour and then put it at the bottom of the list of images. The virtual tour should be the first image the user sees. Here is an example of how the listing page should look:

As you can see, the virtual tour is the very first image that is shown. I can assure you the viewer will definitely click on that arrow. Here’s what happens when they do:

This is the virtual tour of a beautiful and unique home in Woodinville, WA, which I did using the Matterport technology. For this listing the realtor asked me to provide a complete marketing package of home staging, professional photos, virtual tour and related floor plans. The listing generated incredible interest. Three offers and a month later, the house was sold.

I would be happy to help you win more listings and to provide the most immersive and visually engaging property marketing. Contact me, let’s chat!

Mismatching chairs? Yes and… no

Click and drag the arrow left and right to see the before and after image

Home staging tip: I’m sure that by looking at these two photos you’ll see many differences, the paint color (once baby blue, now a neutral off white), the art on the walls, less clutter and different furniture. And that’s exactly what today’s blog post is about: the kind of furniture you need to use when you decide to put your house on the market.

As you can see the table in this (quite small) dining room was nice and unique. A little too big? Yes, but at least the glass top was making it look less bulky. The problem was really the mismatching chairs which, generally speaking, is not really a big issue since sometimes they work quite nicely together.

The problem, in fact, was that two of those chairs were just too…. can I say cheap? And I guess you know I’m talking about the greens ones, right? Those are usually the kind of chairs that you fold, put in a closet and take out when you have extra guests, but it’s not really a good idea to use them when you have to stage a house. This is the reason why we decided to change the whole dining set. The one that you see in the “after picture” was rented and we were lucky enough that its color was very close to the color of the cabinets. The cost? About $70 a month. Was it worth it? I would say, absolutely!

Home staging by Francesca Tosolini
Listing by Jonathan Jones
Photos by Francesca Tosolini
Furniture by Staging and Design Network

An outdated fireplace and its digital remodel

Click and drag the arrow left and right to see the before and after image

One thing that I’ve noticed after working with my realtor clients for so many years, is their concern about how to present properties that for a reason (furniture) or the other (architecture) look outdated. The easiest approach to this problem is, of course, to remove all the furniture and accessories and to replace them with some new, more modern ones. However, this is not always possible, either because the seller still lives in the house or because the budget doesn’t allow it.

For this property, in particular, I was asked to give suggestions about how to spice it up by using some of the seller’s furniture and accessories and some of the realtor’s. Eventually, we moved things around and came up with a nice plan. However, I couldn’t stop wondering how the room would have looked with a different fireplace, furniture, and flooring. Not to mention the TV: how many buyers would find it weird to place the TV in a lower cabinet?

For this room particularly, it was natural to imagine the TV hung above the fireplace which not only looked outdated but also had a mantel that was too high for a flat screen TV. This is why I decided to digitally render the room, and this is how it can potentially look with all these modifications.

Do you have a room that you’d like to remodel, but that you’d prefer to render before finalizing the project, in order to avoid costly mistakes? Let me know, I can help!