How To Use Trends And Is It Always Worth It?
9 September 2021
That was my intuition years ago, and since we also have a business related to renting and selling apartments, I’ve had the opportunity to test for myself how fantastic results can come from the proper application of Home Staging trends.
What will you learn from this article?
- How to use trends in Home Staging?
- At what stage do you match trends to an apartment?
- Is it always worth using trends?
- How has the pandemic affected the tastes of homebuyers?
HOW TO USE THE TRENDS IN HOME STAGING?
First – forget about a neutral interior for everyone, one that will attract as many viewers as possible. Why? Because the goal isn’t to show the apartment as many times as possible and spending a lot of time on it. The goal is to close the deal – whether it’s selling or renting.
That’s why it is important to distinguish between neutralizing the apartment and preparing bland interiors. Neutralization means getting rid of things from the apartment that are characteristic of the owner – typical of their taste and preferences. Depersonalizing the apartment means making it free of marks of the hosts like vacation photos, children’s drawings. These things make it difficult for potential clients to visualize the apartment as their own home. They might like it, but they might still feel that it’s not going to be their space, that it’s very much someone else’s interior. Pretty, but not for them. So our task is to depersonalize and neutralize the apartment.
SECONDLY — BEFORE YOU THINK ABOUT TRENDS, THINK ABOUT PEOPLE
The next step is to “dress” the apartment in such a way that it appeals to a specific target group. This is the most important task of a Home Stager — profiling the target customer. A group of people with specific tastes, characteristics, social or material status, in a specific age range. Because a student will have different requirements to the apartment than a single manager, a young family, or an elderly couple.
Here’s the point where we come to the essence of applying trends in Home Staging. First, we need to define the target group, specify the client for whom the apartment will be the most suitable, and who is most likely to be interested in it. With this knowledge, we can move on to the next step of the analysis — what are these people looking for in an apartment, what are their expectations? With this knowledge we can move on to the next analysis — what are they looking for in an apartment, what are their expectations? Consider what this group likes and what interior trends resonate best with them.
IS IT ALWAYS WORTH USING TRENDS?
After this analysis, you may also conclude that your target group does not expect any trends in their home at all, and that’s ok too. Perhaps they will expect classic interiors instead of modernist, designer solutions. The most important thing is to precisely determine this at the stage of creating the whole home staging concept.
HOW THE PANDEMIC AFFECTS HOME BUYERS
A great example of how Home Staging trends are changing is the changes that occurred in the tastes of clients after the pandemic. Because we are part of a group of people who have lived through a pandemic, its beginning, and development, we already have what is called Pandemic Memory in us. We know that this situation has already happened, that we were confined to our homes, we had to spend much more time in our homes than ever before. We know that there were times during which there were empty shelves in markets because people decided to stock up. And like people who have lived through war, we know that such situations are not an abstraction. Therefore, when choosing apartments, people pay attention to different aspects than before. You will read more about it in the next article.
If you want to know the trends worth considering when preparing an apartment for sale or rent, be sure to check out my Trendbook.
