Happy New Year - I hope you have made some awesome New Year resolutions around property.

My year is off to a great start I'm happy to say. Do you remember the apartment I was selling late last year?    http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/forward-planning/advice-and-hot-topics/investor-stories/38623-home-staging-may-help-sell-your-property-jo-chivers.html

I tried to use the hot Sydney market as an excuse to not present it in its very best light. Trying to sell an apartment with messy tenants in place was a real mistake.                                                   

This was reinforced when I attended one of the open houses and actually saw how cluttered it was.  After this, my selling strategy completely changed.  We immediately took it off the market for a few weeks until the lease expired on the 3rd of December. It took literally two days to do some small repairs, replace a few old fashioned light fittings and have my professional stylist, Kylie from Property Revamped give it her magic touch.  http://propertyrevamped.com.au/

The exciting news is the property exchanged within 17 days of going back onto the market.

I've got some impressive stats to share with you which really go to show that styling a property can make a massive difference. 

First campaign performance on one of the real estate portals:  3,407 views with 6,795 engagements.

A view is someone opening the advertisement in full and an engagement is opening just one element, perhaps a photo, floor plan, map view, or video.

During the second campaign the views increased to 6,688, that's a 96% increase or basically double the views.  Engagement increased to 15,023 or by 121%.

                   Before Styling                                                                      After Styling

Our agent Felice Cotroneo from Innercity Property Agents http://www.innercity.com.au/ said "That whilst enquiry was a lot stronger, the big shift was in the vibe or feeling at the open homes. Before the apartment was styled we received a lot of negative feedback. After it hit the market again with the staging in place, there were many nice comments and a lot of 'wows' which is always a good thing to hear at your opens. People enjoyed just being in the apartment and spent on average two thirds more time at the property." 

                                                                                          Before                                                                                After

In the first campaign we had a total of 29 people through the apartment. In the second campaign this increased by 41% to 41 people.   The offers were no longer low and we sold it at full asking price, which was $65,000 over the offer we received on the previous campaign's auction day.  We paid about $2,000 for Property Revamped to do the styling so that's a 31.5% Return on Investment or ROI.  ROI = (Gains – Cost)/Cost. 

hmmmm, not bad considering the ROI was made in just seventeen days, a good lesson learnt.

www.propertybloom.com.au