Peter Karaglanis on the House Versus the Presentation

Avendor spends 80 grand on a renovation, new kitchen benchtops, fresh paint, landscaping, a month of furniture hire, lists the property and sells for 60 grand above comparable sales. The agent calls it a triumph, the buyer calls it a find.

The question neither of them is asking is whether those numbers actually add up and who exactly was the winner? Peter Karaglianis has spent enough time on both sides of property transactions to understand that presentation isn't just marketing. It's a language, and like any language, it can be used to clarify or to conceal.

We get into where the evidence actually supports spending money before a sale, where vendors cross the line from presenting well into papering over problems. Critically, what a switched on buyer should be reading between the lines when a property looks almost suspiciously too good.

Welcome to the elephant in the room. This is the podcast where we love to talk about the big things in property that never usually get talked about.

I'm Veronica Morgan, real estate agent, buyer's agent and buyer's agent mentor, co-host of Foxtel's Location, Location, Location Australia, author of Auction Ready and co-host of Your First Home Buyer Guide.

Hi, I'm Chris Bates, ex-financial planner and mortgage broker, currently ranked number three in the annual MPA Top 100 Mortgage Broker Awards. Before we get started, everything we talk about today is not personal advice, and we recommend you engage the services of a licensed and experienced professional.

Today's guest is Peter Karaglanis, founder of Presenting Homes Australia, a property presentation strategist who helps homeowners and real estate agents maximize sale price through strategic presentation, buyer psychology, and smart non-structural upgrades. He's got decades of experience to cross...

and a passion for creating value through perception, which is precisely what we want to talk to him about today. Peter believes in one simple truth, presentation doesn't just sell homes, it manufactures demand. So Peter, welcome. I don't think we have actually had a property presentation expert on the podcast before.

So this conversation should be very enlightening and I do, you know, I've got this saying called lipstick on a pig and I know a lot of presentation for sale is lipstick on a pig. So it'd be good to sort of peel back the layers and find out more about that. Welcome.

So good to be here guys. I felt privileged to be asked to join.

Peter, I think it's a good topic. And I mean, I want to start with a bit of a... I mean, everyone knows property styling, right? And that's just what happens in markets. I mean, some markets they don't. But I guess when it's... I feel like it's been commoditized.

This is just my take when I look at it. And it's almost like they've got a furniture thing and they just sort of take it from property to property. And it's not often... I'm just being a bit sort of devil's advocate here. They're just sort of throwing the table.

It's like, where does it... Yes, you've got new furniture. Yes, you've got new bedding. But often I feel like there's a huge opportunity missed when they're not getting the presentation right for the buyer that they're trying to target.

Where does bad styling and presentation, where's the big skill in making sure that you do it right? Okay.

So first thing to understand, styling isn't strategy. And it really is the low fruit on the tree, especially in property. And don't get me onto virtual styling. You know, I don't want to start on the negative. But we have to understand psychology.

So the key thing is 95% of people cannot visualize a home unless there's property in it and it's styled properly.

And so- You mean furniture in there? Yeah, yeah.

Furniture. And so the key thing is depth perception is a huge part of it. When I was sales and marketing manager for a new home construction company and where we dealt with the designers and the stylists, there was a lot of strategy that actually went into depth perception.

And so the key thing is, rather than just thinking about styling in terms of furniture that we put in there, we have to think of a whole of property approach. How does it look? How does it feel? There's a term that I use called selling future memories.

And if you understand how the brain works...

is that when there's colors and there's lighting in a home and there's an ambience and people feel settled and more in particular females resonate in this area, if they can imagine their furniture in this place, then they can begin to imagine their life here.

Once they begin to imagine their life here, it then becomes life events like Christmas, birthdays, your best friend's over for dinner. And then all of a sudden, the brain projects into the future because this home has been set up in a way that they'll envisage living there.

Now, where it works with the brain, the brain doesn't tell the difference between a projection and a memory. And so now we start, as the old term we start, your heart gets sewn into it.

And so the term selling future memories came about because they're projecting into the future, but they're buying a memory that hasn't been lived yet. And so there's a real strategy that happens when we begin with property.

So how would you go about that? I mean, because I guess all the agents are like, yeah, we want a broad buyer pool. We want lots of people interested in it. But broad buyer pool, it's like, you know, niching, right?

Like, do you find that the best, you know, styling slash presentation of a property is when you really go deep on a certain buyer pool that you think is going to likely buy the property as you go deep on a family market with young kids, for example?

How do you sort of approach it?

For me, there's several ways of doing it. So when I'm asked by an agent, a vendor or a buyer's advocate to look at a particular area, and we've just done a couple in Newport at the moment in Victoria.

So for those not living in Melbourne, it's a beachside suburb in the inner ring, Williamstown, fantastic period style homes. So one of the key things we look at is what's the cultural influence in a given area.

So because I've got Greek background, there are areas in Melbourne that had a really high Greek influence. So you'd have Middle Eastern, you would have Asian, those from Southeast Asia, say like India, Pakistan. And each one of those things actually play out in how we plan a property.

So with colours that we use, we tend to deal in a neutral palette. We use three, when we're painting, three lots of neutral colours. And here's the key thing. Whatever furniture someone has, they have to be able to imagine it in this home.

So if you have block colours, like really heavy colours, it can actually turn people off. So essentially it's a clean palette to begin with.

you know, like you're basically saying you're using cultural references, then you're saying you go all neutral. So I don't really get the two things go together. But let's get, rather than get into the actual structure of how you research a property, what I'm curious about is probably more the spend versus the return.

You know, when I first started in real estate back in 2000, you know, only the most exclusive properties got styled. And let's say styling. The styling wasn't like a warehouse full of stock standard furniture that just every styling job looked the same. Everyone was unique.

It had a designer come in and give it that sort of that personal flair and that personality, which was designed obviously for two things, I would say. One is to maximize the appeal to buyers.

So they walk in and recognize that, oh, wow, you can live in this place because this is where you put the sofa, this is where you put the dining table, etc., etc., But also it helps with space.

Like a room, a lot of people think that a room without any furniture looks bigger than a room with furniture. But the minute you start putting furniture in, as long as you don't put too much in, the room itself ends up looking better, you know.

And so that's slowly over the – I was selling for six years. By the time we finished – In that six year period, we went to almost styling every single property. And again, that's when we started seeing this mainstream styling where every house started looking the same.

We used to have a stylist that did that unique sort of design and was really thinking about the end buyer. But if you're trying to think about every buyer walking through imagining their sofa and they, well, everyone, everybody's got a different sofa. Everyone, everybody's got different tastes.

So you've got to find a way to present a property that maximizes the appeal without alienating anybody, right? So I guess that's where you come out with your neutrals.

So when a property has clearly had a cosmetic blitz before sale, fresh paint throughout, new carpet, new fittings, et cetera, what's the first thing that a buyer should be interrogating that they probably aren't?

Number one thing is look to the walls. So when a place has just had a quick paint job, you'll get to see all of this all the way through it every single time. That's what I look for. I look at the ceilings.

What are the cuttings like around the corner scene and around the door frames? Because quite often, if it's had a really cheap and nasty patch,

you'll really unaccomplished painters will do that and that's when you see a really cheap job and over spray you'll see it on window frames on flooring it just stands out so the key thing we do is what's called a level five finish before a lick of paint goes on.

So the guys run through, they have a look at what the diddits are, they've got this machine that they run up and down the walls and it flattens it all out. So the preparation is about 50% of what we do. And that's the key big thing.

Yeah, because I'd imagine that if you really are doing it quick and dirty, that you're just going to do it, come in, paint quickly, get out, as opposed to do a paint job that will last you maybe five or ten years. So that is obviously the quality of the paint job.

Otherwise, you might get a freshly painted house that actually you're going to have to repaint in a year. I was seeing... some bodgy stuff though. Like I really have, I saw a door where somebody obviously punched a hole in it. And so it had been patched up with glad wrap.

I kid you not. And then spray painted and somebody had actually accidentally lent on it and, and put their hands through it and then found out what it was. Like I've, I've, Every time I walk into a house and I smell fresh paint, I'm suspicious because I think it's probably covering up damp.

You can cover up damp for a very short period of time. It's really bad rising damp. You're going to start seeing it bubbling probably before settlement. But for the duration of the sales period, often you can have a really well-painted, but it's still got the structural issue of damp.

So another one I went to one day, and in fact, these people – I spoke to the woman who bought this property. They didn't engage us to help them, but I happened to bump into her in the street.

I saw her at the open house, and I bumped into her in the street after she bought the property, and I said – It was one of these houses that smelt fresh paint. And I went upstairs and I could see water on the walls.

And it could have been condensation or it could have been a leaking roof. And so I said to her, so what was the cause of the water upstairs? Now she hadn't noticed it.

And then she sheepishly admitted to me she didn't get a building and pest inspection because it looked like it had been freshly renovated. So I was like, wow. So there's lots of things that people don't even notice.

It's not so much the quality of the paint job, but it's more what's the paint job covering up.

So the one thing that we say to all our vendors is count on a building and pest. It's just part of life.

And so quite often we recommend that they do it even before we begin because it's actually cheaper to deal with the issue before we begin because we've got all the trades on site anyway. So we've got electricians and flooring guys and painters and landscapers.

In fact, we had one that we just finished in Newport. We discovered...

um after a rain that the water had come through the walls and that was really simple it was backed up gutters it had never been cleaned out so where the water had come between the wall we actually cut out all the plaster um we put in a dehumidifier and an air mover everything was dried out um there was no mold and it was dealt with you didn't fix the gutter no no you didn't

No, no, no. We had, because we were doing landscaping, my guys went up and cleared all the gutters out around the house. So when you're doing building and pest, you know, the thing is you have to prepare for the worst. And once we know what that is, then we do the work.

I mean, I think that my sister just sold a house actually in Melbourne and, you know, I think the agent did a really good job. They sort of, you know, like what you're talking about, I don't think the styling was a bit of back and forth.

That was sort of my original comment is that it was a pretty... I don't know, the table was too small and it was the wrong type of furniture and lots, you know, the kitchen table, the dining table, like, you know, the art on the wall.

I feel like it was definitely a bit off the styling. But I mean, what he did really well is they sort of really consulted through that sort of pre-sales campaign, right? Like, do we fix the deck? Do we not fix the deck? Do we paint? You know, do we...

Do you feel like that's where sometimes sellers, particularly when they're selling investments, is they just don't have the time and the desire to really invest in actually trying to maximize the sale price? And also the agent slows it down, right? The agent's got a lot of trust with the seller.

you know, often they just want to get the thing signed up and listed, right? And they don't want to, I guess, educate the seller on, hey, if you do list it, these things are going to hold it back.

Do you find that a lot of properties just don't get presented well because, you know, the agent or the seller themselves just don't understand the value of just making sure they list it right and list it, you know, once? 100%.

We had a property in Croydon last year where the agent was actively working against me.

i'm going to sell those ears oh man i had five visits with the vendor and he was trying to off market and she didn't even know what an off market was and it was valued at around 520 in its current state they spent 46 with us and it ended up for selling 776 000 because she listened to all the things we said that needed to do and she did the work

And she did really well. Fortunately, most investors that I come across and about 95% of our properties at the moment, investors getting out, they want to do the work.

They want to, when they sell the place, make sure they kill the mortgage place, pay off CGT and have something for themselves. And so we actually begin with a design division. We do full renderings of what we want to do with the place.

So they'll know what colors the outside are going to be. They'll know what colors the inside will be. We even pick a theme. So mid-century modern. If it's got a beachy theme, we'll do that. And it'll go off to the vendors, the agents. and whoever's gonna supply the furniture.

So everyone knows what we're gonna do before we do a thing. And that just takes away all the doubt.

That's a big ask though. Like on a property that was originally, you said it was the appraisal was what, $520,000?

In its current state, yeah.

Yeah. And she's asked to spend almost 10%, like, you know what, 8% or so of that value and on a promise that you're going to get back at least double that. And she obviously did better than that, which is fantastic. But that's a big ask.

I mean, taking on a low value property like that as well, How do you get... And you're fighting against the agent. I know dealing with vendors, a lot of owners would be thinking, oh, look, I'm going to lean with the agent here because I really prefer not to spend that money.

And it is a risk, right? So how do you work out which properties are worth the risk and which ones aren't? Because there's no guarantees. You could go in there and say this, but at the end of the day... it still might not materialize, right? The market could turn on you.

You might have a budget in the middle of it that completely throws everything into a spin. There's all sorts of things that can happen. They might end up with egg on their face. So how does an owner work through that deliberation process?

I think transparency from the beginning. So when we sit down and we have stages, so we have three different stages that they work from. Stage one deals with all the pressure washing, the cleaning and making everything just as neat as a bell.

Second stage deals with painting, some flooring and some minor electrical works like updating light switches, GPOs, you know, to start the yellow and they look really bad.

And third stage is where we start adding lighting, flooring, so whether we do carpets, hybrid flooring or sanding, and we deal with the gardens. So everyone finds that comfort point that they're willing to work to and they choose where they want to go. Interestingly enough,

We have some clients who just want to do stage one, which is quite basic. And then once we're into it, they go, can we now do stage two? Because they already know what the costs are going to be and it's all transparent.

They know every cent they're going to spend before they do anything. But it's really simple. I mean, you can't go wrong painting or lighting.

No, generally not. No, I mean, it's funny though, you know, I look at a lot of houses before and after the presentation and you think the poor, maybe not investors so much, but the owner occupies, it looks better. It looks better than it's looked for years.

You know, they only get to enjoy it in the final weeks of owning the property. It's a bit sad really. And investment properties, you can understand, they've probably had a fair amount of wear and tear with tenants and you presume that they

would hopefully maintain their properties throughout that period of time, but it's never going to have the same attention given to it that an owner-occupied house typically does. You did say something earlier about, though, that a lot of investors are selling.

You are in Melbourne, and we have talked about this quite a lot on the podcast before, which is that a lot of Melbournians have quite a negative take on the property market or as the economy of the state is.

And they've sort of been selling up, whereas a lot of interstate investors have been moving into Melbourne. That may well change now, given the budget that we've had. But have you noticed that in terms of the type of inquiry you've had? Has it really been an uptick from investors versus owner-occupiers?

Or has it been gradual? How has that manifested for you? How have you noticed it?

Since 2023, 95% of our business is investors.

And what was it before?

Would have been 50-50. And what's the story they're telling you why they're selling? People will have been willing to put up with some of the legislative changes in terms of minimum standards they provide for the renters in the marketplace. But our state government's incessant drag on taxing everything.

It just gets to a point where they've got all these extra taxes coming on. And unfortunately, some of the decisions being made by these investors, they haven't got advice. They're going to the newspapers for their advice on what they should do next.

And I always recommend that they actually speak to professionals. But they're just over the government treating private property like a public asset. And it's as simple as that.

And so my thoughts on the investing industry is really quite strong in terms of how the whole thing works. But on the exit... Every single one of them want to do well.

Not one property ever that we've prepared for market that's been an investor property has ever gone to another investor. And it's never gone to a first-time buyer. It's either an upsizer or a downsizer every single time.

That's interesting. So you're... Yeah, I agree. It's like a death by a thousand cuts. And then the land tax was probably the final straw for a lot of people in Victoria because they never had a land tax bill. And all of a sudden, they've got this extra tax. I've got my rates.

I've got my maintenance. I've got this. And all of a sudden, I've got this land tax bill. And it didn't really matter how much it was. It was just that it was a bill that they felt like there was an extra one down there.

But you found that a lot of them have just sort of a bailing and that, you know, and there's not many other new investors sort of playing in the market. You're finding that, you know, it's a lot of just like you said, upsizes and, you know, not even first time buyers. Yeah.

No, because the jump, so when I always say to clients, you know, wait for we invest, it's the aim to doubling your money. You put in 100, you get another 100 on top of that on the way back. It's always way more than that.

So strategically, we need to set their properties up to maximize value and sales price. to get maximum buyer appeal and minimise time on market. And so the whole key thing is that we're talking about a buyer psychology.

And when people are buying primary residence, they're not thinking necessarily with an investor mindset. And so, you know, when you talk earlier on, Veronica, about, you know, was it really worth it for her spending nearly 10% on that property in Cordon?

A, she'd owned it since 1983 and she hadn't spent any money, never been painted. So the valuation came from where the property actually was with no work being done.

When we finished it, there was multiple offers on auction day and it went along and it sold extremely well. So that's where people are spending more money. If they haven't maintained their property, they're going to spend more money to bring it to where it's truly valued.

Yeah. I mean, we talk about that with our property management clients as well. It's like you want to keep your property as close to peak saleable condition at all times. And that sort of helps get best rents and it helps with maintenance and it helps with ongoing maintenance costs as well.

You're not sort of building up problems that get worse and worse and water in particular will get worse and worse and the bill gets bigger and bigger. Talking about investors though, so when you're selling a property, the potential upside of styling and presenting and doing upgrades is obviously large, right?

So then you can sort of pitch it and show examples and case studies of they spent X and they got Y back, et cetera, et cetera. But when you're offering a property for rent, the payback, the return on furnishing it before you –

open it up for tenants it's just not there so that's where that leads to virtual styling and you mentioned sort of at the very beginning that you hate virtual styling I've seen some particularly terrible virtual styling where there's like furnitures up floating in the rooms but I've seen some really good virtual styling as well because you've got two things here right you're trying to get people in the door and this goes for selling as well and obviously if you're trying to get tenants you want as many people through the door as possible and then obviously once they're there when you're selling a property it's important that they're not

let down. They haven't been brought into the property on false pretenses with tenancy, particularly when you've got very low vacancy rates. That's less of an issue, obviously. But why do you hate virtual styling? I hate it.

And there's a big difference how I break up the market. So when you're selling a property, it's essentially aiming for a primary homeowner because when people walk in, and they can't visualize how the space is going to be used. Understanding they're buying it for themselves.

And so when it's all there laid out in front of them, I mean, for three or four grand, it's the best investment in my opinion you can do. And so when people walk in and they go, oh yeah, we can put furniture here. It looks like this. It just fires the imagination.

And it also means a wife can justify getting rid of old furniture to her husband. Man, we can't bring that old land suite into here. It'll look terrible. Interestingly, when we talk investor property, so I'm dealing with an investor at the moment.

She's a medical professional and she has 10 investor properties in the inner ring in Melbourne. And one of the key truths that I'll share with every investor is a renter wants to feel the same thing a homeowner does. that sense of belonging and pride.

So when a place is painted really well, you hear me always talk about lighting. Work from home demands that we have appropriate lighting in a place, not one crappy little oyster light in the middle of a room.

And even all the GPOs, we put all the GPOs or your power switchers We install the ones with the USB, USC ports in all the major routes because people can charge their phones and their computers without having using power boards.

So it's safer, but it's more usable. And so the strategy that we use on investor properties and primary residents are almost similar with some variations in it.

So you might do a freshen up on an investment property, but you're not necessarily, unless it's up for sale, you're not going to necessarily furnish it though, are you?

Oh, no. Not unless it's a really high end. We've done it. A really high. We did an apartment in Melbourne that the agent told me that it goes for $4,200 a week. I mean, that's crazy money.

Yeah.

That's a different ballgame.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, you know, like you say also that buyers can't sort of visualize a room.

It's funny because I think it's a skill that we've all lost, you know, because as I said, when I first started in real estate, people were used to walking through empty houses and they could quite happily and easily work out where their furniture went.

But I think we've all, it's a bit like having, you know, all these sensors in our cars, you know, like I used to be able to reverse park with one wing mirror and the, you know, the main, Main, what do you call it? Revision mirror. Revision mirror, yeah.

the actual bones of the property we've sort of taught them because everything's styled these days that it, and in fact, I do see, and so buyers lack the ability to see beyond the styling.

And in fact, what I have to often recommend clients think about and, and buyers in our first home buyer course as well, it's like, You're not buying the furnishings. You're not buying the artwork on the wall. You're not buying the styling. You're buying what the fabric of the house.

And when you take people through a pre-sale inspection, when all that stuff's gone, it can be quite depressing for people if they haven't actually recognized what they're buying. And I find that, I mean, when I was a sales agent, I was always like, cringing when people come through on the pre-settlement.

As a buyer's agent, our clients are well-educated. They know what to expect. But that is something, that is a fact. And I think that buyers aren't as critical as they probably should be when they're looking through properties.

And I guess that's your whole industry is based on supporting that and taking that critical thinking away from a buyer, correct?

No, actually, I understand the marketplace probably better than most agents. And here's why. You have an investor mindset. My mindset is I don't care who pays the most money. I want it sold to them. So think about this.

When you go clothes shopping, and I do it a lot with my wife, if you have a look how men's retail stores are set up, like Suits, and I'm sure Chris, you're aware of that.

But then you go to the female ones, the lighting, the styling, the colors, even some of the scents, it elicits.

a certain type of client and it draws them in and people feel good about it and it's interesting my experience has been females have the greatest influence on buying primary residence more than any than males by a long shot and so the key thing is when you feel like you belong it does influence the purchase

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you're right. The couple, one might be doing the numbers and dealing with the agent and sort of coming up with a map of what they're going to look at as a sort of a couple.

But ultimately, you know, often it's the other party who's sort of making the decision of which ones they are really keen on or not. Right. I think we've talked about this lots on the podcast for eight years. It's around the psychology of the sort of market matters even more so.

But I mean, I guess where I'm interested in is, do you think that this, you know, we're getting there? You know, you've been doing this for a long time. You probably felt like you were black sheep, you know, for a long time as well.

But do you find that, you know, most agents get this now, most people, properties hitting the market as sort of taking this serious and not just listing it. I mean, Melbourne's a tough market to sell, right?

If you haven't presented it immaculately, you really get that one buyer really keen, you can really butcher your sale and your digital real estate, right? So do you feel like people are getting it now?

Or do you feel like when you look at stuff online, it's still very rare that people are presenting things the right way?

There's this term I created called the Pinstagram generation. And so the biggest visual mediums are Instagram and Pinterest. And I coined that term after helping my daughter and son-in-law find a property. And they had done all their research online.

And so the new generation of sales agents coming through in their 20s and 30s, they're digital natives. And most people's first touch base with a property is definitely online.

So the greatest resistance I get are from older real estate agents, mid 40s and above, where some of the best ones I deal with are mid 30s and below. Those who want to stick around really want to be the best at what they do.

They present well themselves. How they present to market personally is of a high standard. The properties they want to represent to market are of a high standard as well.

So be location dependent though, wouldn't it? Because, you know, I think in some areas, a bit higher socioeconomic, for example, I would think that it's not necessarily a generational thing with agents, that it's around the price points and the expectation in those markets.

Would you say that it's more demographic than it is age of agents?

No, we have done plenty of properties in lower socioeconomic areas. And they don't spend as much. You know, we're going to be looking at under 20 grand.

But with painting and some flooring and a little bit of landscaping, it just cuts through in the marketplace. And so the key thing is when people are walking into the home and the house is presented well, the first thing it does is it moves away those wanting to put in low-ball offers.

So it moves a certain amount of buyers away and brings in better qualified buyers. So, yeah.

I'm going to refute you on that only because I've been a selling agent. And if the market is tough, you know, no amount of beautiful styling is going to make somebody pay more. It might increase competition. That's what's going to make them pay more.

But if a buyer is in isolation and they're the only person interested and they know that, there's no way that they're going to pay more just because it's styled. So I don't necessarily think that is true. I mean, it might bring them into the house. It might get them interested in the house.

And that's really important because without them, there might not be a buyer. But I don't think that they just suddenly go, oh, I'm going to pay more because it's styled. I think that... It is an interesting thing, though, because that competition, however, that is really the bit that you're trying to set up.

It's like every good agent is trying to basically maximize exposure to that property. So that comes to how it's presented, how it's photographed, the video that they might do, the portals that they put on, the social media campaign that they put together for that property, obviously how their open houses are run.

There's a lot that's involved in obviously with a very good agent. I mean, we do a lot of vendor advocacy. So we're very on top of these agents. And the market is tough at the minute in a lot of the places that we're helping clients.

It's even slowing down in Brisbane now, you know. So the market is going to get tough and there will be a – a requirement to make sure that you maximize the presentation of your property to get that outcome. But there's so much more involved than just simply presenting it well.

And the other thing too, what we'd see is when days on market stretch out, they might run out of money for having that hired furniture in there. And then you find they end up selling it empty anyway. So the furniture didn't sell the property. The styling didn't sell the property.

It just took longer to get a And then, as I said, their budget ran out. So you must come across that too in a tough market. How do you deal with that?

Okay, so let me just pick you up on something. You said style and you're thinking furniture, which is different to presentation. When we talked about we do the claim, there are plenty of properties that we have done where their existing furniture gets cleaned up and then they get new –

They do the covers. They do all of that. It doesn't always mean furniture's hired. But what you can't get away from is whether a house is painted or not. You just can't get away from it. It's the cheapest upgrade. And window furnishings.

Yeah, I agree with you.

So because we operate in three stages, we build on it. There are some areas that people don't blink at the money we quote, and there are other areas where they start blinking at a much lower number. but we set it up so that they can keep moving forward.

I mean, you've talked about obviously painting, cleaning, you know, door wire, door handles, you know, the electrical. These are some of the basics, like you say, on stage one, redo your flooring, redo your carpets. And then you start going up the chain, obviously.

It sounds like then you get into professional styling, et cetera. I mean, what's your thoughts on the sort of landscaping, right? Because it's, You know, it's a bit of a catch-22, right? Like beautiful gardens that are all well manicured and, you know, it looks amazing.

Some buyers will be looking at it going, God, that seems a lot of work. And then other gardens, which, you know, and people can't really imagine that. Some would absolutely fall in love with it and go, wow, I've never thought I'd be able to create a garden like this.

Other people would just want like a hedge around the outside and a nice bit of grass, right? And so what's your sort of a take on it? And how do you sort of, you know, what's your sort of default trying to get a landscaping too?

Because I think it's one of those things that's obviously, you know, people, you know, does gives that, you know, people fall in love with the property.

It's like you're saying when they first see it off the street and, you know, they're trying to visualize what it would be like there with their family, right? So landscaping is probably something they don't do enough, but you can also butcher it, I guess, by trying to do too much. 100%. So, yeah.

The key thing with the garden, we had a place that we just did recently where there was no gardens to speak of. Everything was overgrown. So we cleared it all out. We built some garden hedges. So we put in some hedges around.

We put in some black bark and we put plants in there. You know, the budget for that place was three and a half grand to clean up all the gardens. It looked amazing and neat.

And I found someone who could pick up some of the grass, did a little bit of seeding, and it looked really clean and neat. We didn't have to spend a lot of money, but it's amazing what you can do when you're putting garden hedging, black bark, and some nice plants.

And then we go to the other extreme in Toorak, where they spent $2 or $3 million on a garden. I mean, I wouldn't recommend that for a cheap suburb. And they're pre-existing gardens. But the key things is so it looks neat and clean coming in. And how we put together prices on things...

is it's about maximizing return, not spend. And that's our default. How can we make the most of what we got? And so it's really simple things like nature strips. We get our guys to do three or four houses each side of our one.

So they'll mow all the nature strips. They'll edge it all. We pressure wash the footpaths and we go up four or five houses either side. And on the last house we just finished, we had to end up doing the neighbor's front garden because it was terrible. And we did that.

That's a really good idea.

Yeah, it didn't cost them anything. The vendor understood that having junk all over the next door neighbor's garden that being oven grown was going to affect their one. So I knocked on the door. And it does.

And we pressure washed their driveways and we put the black bark in and it looked like one big continuation. And their fence was the same as the one we had and we painted the fence. Yeah, yeah.

No, it's a really good idea, right? Because people, it's the first impression. Absolutely. You look at the house, you look at the neighbor, not many people go four or five houses up and a back and around the back and look at the other houses, et cetera.

But, you know, that first impression, right, when someone rocks up is such a key thing. Peter, have you got a property Dumbo for us to finish it off? It's like a story that's like, you know, like just a humorous story. A lesson. A lesson. No, this happened. It was quite funny. Yeah.

Okay. So in a southeastern suburb called Roeville, an Italian family had built this McMansion in 1979, brought their kids up.

parents were really old and I wanted to sell and downsize so it was about an acre and a half of land and the house would have been about 70 squares which is really large they did everything we painted we did everything we finished on a Friday and I was going to have a billboard put on Monday and on Monday I got a phone call from the agent and he was swearing at me a lot

And I said, what's wrong? He goes, that house you finished. I go, I thought they were happy with it. He goes, too, we've been happy. He goes, they've taken the house off the market. And so he said, I want you to do a good job, but not too good.

I said to him, don't worry. Their issues are still the same. They're still going to be spilling coffee and drinks. They won't be able to maintain it. And within six months, it was on the market and the market had shifted upwards.

And the sale price in the end was a lot more than had they sold early in the year. So we do have houses come off the market. That's a lucky story. Yeah.

While we do have houses come off the market, I think you said, Veronica, that the house looks best when they're selling it. They've never had to live in it. Yeah. And we do have that because people can't imagine what it's going to be like.

Yeah. Yeah. Peter, that's been a bit of a fun chat. It's not as serious as many of our chats. And so I've enjoyed listening to you and those insights on how to, I guess, get the most out of a property when you're selling. So thanks for joining us today.

It's been a pleasure, guys. Thanks so much, Peter.

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