Each week, Tim and Julia Haycocks, the husband-and-wife team behind Stowhill Estates Berkshire, will be tackling your property questions with honest guidance, clear opinions and useful, real-world advice for anyone navigating the Berkshire property market.
My agent keeps talking about ‘lifestyle marketing’ and making the house feel ‘aspirational’, but surely buyers just want to see the rooms? Does putting a croissant on the kitchen island and a blanket over a chair actually help sell a house, or is it nonsense?” B.W, Wokingham
Owners, Julia & Tim Haycocks
A lonely croissant on a kitchen island probably won’t sell your house. I’ll give you that. But a beautifully set-up breakfast scene in a warm, light-filled kitchen? That can absolutely help.
Most buyers are not just looking at walls, measurements and number of bedrooms. They are trying to picture themselves living there. They want to know where Saturday mornings happen. Where Christmas lunch goes. Where they’ll watch the World Cup with their friends. Where the kids will do their homework. Where they’ll sit with a glass of wine when everyone has finally gone to bed!
So yes, the photos still need to show the rooms properly – of course they do. You need clear, truthful room shots (no wide-angle photos, please!), sensible angles, floor plans and all the practical information. But as well as helping buyers understand the mechanics of the house, your marketing should also help them understand the feeling of what it could be like to live there. That is where good lifestyle marketing makes a real difference.
There are lots of things you can do yourself to help prior to photos being taken. Lay the dining table like you’re having a dinner party, or get the barbecue and cushions for outside furniture out. A good agent will then add to that, with touches that lean into the emotional side of marketing and help people envisage their future life if they were to live there. This isn’t a half hour quick photos-and-done job. When we capture marketing assets for a property for example, we’ll typically be there for around five hours with a team of three of us to make sure genuine attention to detail has been paid to every room.
We’re lucky to work with great photographers and the same people on every shoot so they understand what we’re trying to achieve. In the unlikely event that we haven’t moved a dressing gown off the back of a bedroom door or hidden a toilet brush, they’ll do it for us before they take the final picture.
That level of staging, styling and attention matters even more for video. A photograph can show a lovely kitchen, but a video can show how that kitchen connects to the garden, how the light moves through the room, how high the ceilings are and how the house flows from one moment to the next. That’s something that can be hugely enhanced by including people in the video to provide perspective and a frame of reference to viewers.
We have worked with plenty of clients who were sceptical about this at first. Someverysceptical! We’ve had the sort of look that says,“ Julia, if you start placing pastries around my house, we’re going to have a problem.” But once they see it done properly, they totally get it. Because it is not about making a home look false. It is about making it feel alive, and even if it might not be your cup of tea, you’re not selling the house to yourself; you’re selling it to other people. The overwhelming majority of people will find this significantly more appealing than a property that looks stark and unlived in.
The proof is in the feedback. Buyers mention it – they always talk about the video at a viewing and how they ‘just had to see the house’ after watching it. They say they could imagine themselves there. Quite often, it is the feeling created by the lifestyle marketing that makes someone stop scrolling and book a viewing.
So no, a random croissant will not sell your home. But showing the breakfast bar being used as the heart of family life? Showing the terrace as somewhere for summer drinks? Showing the snug as the place everyone disappears to after Sunday lunch? That can absolutely be the difference between someone seeing your house as just a list of property details versus them seeing it as a lifestyle and their future home.
All the best with your house-selling journey.
Tim & Julia
Phone: 0118 207 30 30
berkshire@stowhillestates.com
WhatsApp: 07346 134548 www.stowhillestatesberkshire.co.uk
