Home staging is a specialised skill which involves creating the perfect atmosphere in your home using furniture and accessories, plants and lighting, to garner buyer interest for your property and sell it faster, for the best price.

Home staging is still a fairly new concept, but this doesn’t diminish the importance of it on today’s housing market, here’s why:

The evidence

As evidenced in the research by the Home Staging Association UK, staged properties sell, on average, twice as fast and for up to 10% more than properties without staging. Therefore, if you had a property valued at £300K before staging, it is likely to sell for between £24,000 and £30,000 more once staged. *

Visual appeal matters

Most prospective buyers will not be able to imagine living in a home that’s empty or on the flip side, cluttered. If a property is vacant of furniture, or is not looking at its best, potential buyers will struggle to envision its full potential or imagine making the home their own. If buyers can’t picture themselves living in the property, they are unlikely to commit to buying it.

Selling more than just the property

When looking for their next potential home, prospective buyers will seek out a place that the reflects the lifestyle they aspire to, rather than the lifestyle they currently have. The type of property most people choose to buy and how much they are willing to pay is directly related to how good the property makes them feel when they browse through images and step inside. If the property represents a lifestyle that a buyer aspires for, then they’ll most likely be willing to pay more for it.

Playing to its strengths

Every property has its setbacks, which is why it’s important to highlight its key selling points until they overshadow any of the downsides. Staging focuses the eye and attention of the home’s strengths and detracts from anything that could be deemed unsightly. If a potential buyer falls in love with your home, they are likely to turn a blind eye to any minor repairs and improvements they’ll need to make once they move in. In an empty property, everything is on display and even minor defects can become a major sticking point.

Get ahead of competition

For every attractive home, there’s another one right around the corner, and staging could be the thing that sets yours apart from the rest. The first thing buyers do when looking for a home is browse properties online, and the listings with most attractive images will be the ones that garner the most clicks. If other properties in your area are on board with the concept of property staging and your listing photos haven’t been staged, your home could fall behind in the ranks as your property’s pictures may not match up to the same standard.

Hiring a property staging specialist will cost you short term but the profits will be abundant when your house is sold. Staging specialists can offer useful tips and advice on how best to prepare your home for sale, and can also help with other important details from clearing and decluttering, to moving furniture, and finishing with those all-important final touches for a viewing.

Looking for advice on selling your home? Get in touch today and let us help you.

As the cost-of-living spikes, landlords and tenants involved in ‘bills included’ rental contracts will need to communicate clearly with one another in order to grapple with the new host of challenges. As for landlords offering bills included in their monthly rental fees, there are three key things to consider…

Landlords should avoid confusion on government’s £400 rebate

The former Chancellor recently announced that households across the UK can expect a £400 grant this autumn to help out with soaring energy bills. There is also further assistance available for the most vulnerable. But when it comes to rental properties, the tenants will need to be aware that the £400 rebate will go directly to the bill payer, which will be the landlord in instances where the cost of utilities is included in their monthly rental fee.

Most landlords will retain the payment to help alleviate the growing costs of the energy and water bills that they are paying on behalf of their tenants. In the case that tenants have misunderstood the government’s helpful scheme, they might expect that the rebate is to be paid to them, even if they don’t pay utility bills directly. Agents and landlords can avoid this by communicating their plans and the reasoning behind them well in advance to ensure tenants don’t feel as though they have been left in the dark on the situation, and the next steps are clear.

Landlords may need to be clear about costs

As announced by The National Trading Standards (NTS) during May 2022, there are new changes to the rules around the material information that letting and estate agents should include in listings through property portals and their own sites. This means that tenants must be provided clarity on their "unavoidable costs" of renting the property. This includes council tax bands, deposits, and the price of rent. As the new rules are expanded, the regulations will soon cover additional areas such as utility set-ups or information detailing flood risk status.

In light of this, landlords offering ‘bills included’ tenancies will need to be upfront about costs and any variations in prices that may occur during the contract. All of this information will need to be communicated to the tenant explicitly and upfront by the agents, rather than on request.

Now might be the perfect time to invest in energy efficiency 

New Government legislation entails that by 2025, private sector landlords will have to ensure that their rental properties adhere to the required energy efficiency rating of ‘C’ or above on new tenancies. The UK is also set to ban gas boilers in all new build properties, starting from the same year. Due to this, landlords will need to boost the energy efficiency of their portfolios as soon as possible in order to keep up with changing legislation.

Arguably, with the lettings market retaining unparalleled buoyancy, and demand for rental properties reaching record highs, now is the best time to invest in existing stock ahead of the regulatory changes. Likewise, more energy efficient housing supply, would reduce the overheads for landlords who offer bills-included tenancies.

Visit our website today to browse our available properties.

While the market continues to change and grow in today’s climate, in order to look forward and predict future trends, it’s important to look back. New research from GetAgent tracked house price data going back as far as the 1970s, adjusting for inflation, to see which decade has been the most fruitful for the nation’s homeowners. *

The research delves back into January 2010, when the average UK house price was £167,469, and climbed to £231,792 by the end of the decade at a 38.4% increase. However, after adjusting for inflation, the rate of house price growth recorded between January 2010 and December 2019 sits at around 14.8%, which was the second lowest rate of house price growth in any of the past five decades.

In fact, it’s only been the 90s, when the market has posted the worst performance, with house prices increasing by just 9.7% after adjusting for inflation.

The noughties was by no means, a bad decade for homebuyers, but it still ranks just third where inflation-adjusted house price growth is concerned, with the average UK house price rising by a notable 66.8%.

The research placed the 70’s in second place of the ranking, with house prices climbing by 69.8% after adjusting for inflation, leaving the 80’s to be crowned the best decade to have bought a home.

After adjusting for inflation, the average UK house price was just £66,783 back in January 1980. By the end of the decade, the cost of buying bricks and mortar had climbed to £127,207, a 90.5% increase.

Colby Short, Co-founder and CEO of GetAgent.co.uk, commented: “There’s plenty of reasons why we may argue one decade was better than the rest, but when it comes to house price appreciation, the eighties takes it by some margin.”

"Even after adjusting for inflation, today’s generation of homebuyers may well find it unfathomable that the average home cost just shy of £67,000 back in 1980. So, while today’s buyers have had to contend with some of the lowest levels of housing affordability in history, they may well spare a thought for those who saw the cost of buying increase at such an alarming rate during their lifetime.”

"With the market currently running red hot and no end in sight despite the wider economic landscape, it will certainly be interesting to see where we finish by the end of this decade, and if the eighties will finally be relieved of the crown when it comes to the highest rate of house price appreciation in a single decade.”

Do you know how much you could achieve for your home? Book a valuation with our local experts today.