Help! What are we missing with our house sale?

[GXDavid]

Hi Everyone,

We had sold our house but then got dropped three weeks before exchange. We have had some viewers and a lowball offer but haven't found that right buyer yet.

Our house is a 1928 Arts & Crafts style house in a private estate, ten minutes from the station/ shops and with a good selection of local private and public schools included a coveted catchment and distance to Dr Challoners grammar schools. The house is fully modernised (wiring, plumbing, heating, windows, kitchen and bathrooms) and is neutrally decorated apart from the kitchen/ dining room which is big enough to take quite a bold maroon colour that offsets the modern kitchen and flooring. For the local market we are on point re pricing , if not a little cheap. So my question is what are we missing?

If you look at the details - what is there that might put you off? Any comments very gratefully received as we feel like we have done everything we can to present the house but wonder if we are missing anything?

www.frostweb.co.uk/property-details/375332/buckinghamshire/gerrards-cross/the-queensway-1

Thanks and regards,

David

I used to live a couple of miles up the road from GX and know the area well, albeit we were at a lower level in the housing market. Frost’s sold our house in the Chalfonts and did a good job with our photos for a house selling at roughly a third of the price of yours. I would definitely ask them to re-do the photos.

Your house is absolutely beautiful from the outside but the interior photos make it look disappointing. The photos show a rather clinical house, not a much loved home. There is an awful lot of floor visible and it really does look like laminate - our laminate hallway floor looks remarkably similar!

I would want to see photos of at least two other bedrooms and at least one en-suite. I assume the currently included bedroom photo is of the master bedroom? It’s from an odd angle and doesn’t sell the concept of a spacious master suite at all - in fact it looks a bit like the person has only just got out of bed and pulled the duvet up at the last second.

You say there are a lot of original features - some close-up photos of them would I’m sure be a good selling point. A close-up of your front door, and your stairs if they are lovely, and any other period features would really help you sell the concept of it being an Arts & Crafts home.

@florascotia2
If you knew GX you would know this estate is The Firs conservation area of late 1920s houses. They are later than Arts snd Crafts in the William Morris sense. Therefore potential buyers would not necessarily expect to see a museum piece of William Morris snd Liberty Design which were several decades earlier. None the less, locally this is an arts and crafts house. I rather agree that too many good features of the late 20s are missing but it’s not impossible to create a better atmosphere here.

There is a semi for sale in the road for £900,000 but it’s half the size. So I would cut out the “offers over” and ask for £1,495,000. You don’t seem to be in a race for offers.

Also the Frost site doesn’t link to a detailed description. The semi does. Maybe because you have a brochure. But the detail for the cottage is better.

I would be interested in your house if I was buying. The area has great houses in it snd the conservation tag keeps it authentic.

The problem with the pool table isn't that, for example, I wouldn't use a pool table. The problem is that combined with the horrible photography it makes the room seem small and poky.

I can easily see past decor. But when decor frames a room, bad decor can give the wrong impression in photographs about the size/shape/potential of a room. Rugs in the wrong place foreshorten a room, for instance. A pool table crowds it out. Does it matter that I might not like a particular couch? Of course not. Does it matter that the placement of a couch makes the room look half as long as it is? Yes.

Again, this was different before covid when you could just take a chance on dropping by a place. But as it is right now, particularly with the deadline, people have to be wooed into a place. That's why staging matters. If it didn't matter, all houses would be sold with pictures taken of them in normal action, with dishes/books/knickknacks scattered about and the laundry on a rack.

Waxed - no, not about the pool-table, but what about the nasty modern floors and the industrial style kitchen and the (!!!) bathroom - none are cheap to replace. Also - this is just a suggestion - the ground-floor plan has surely been changed over the years, with some knocking through, in modern style? The proportions of some rooms are not easy to live with as they are at present - hence earlier posters' comments about the sitting room looking like a corridor.
I am sure that, as you say, genuine buyers will see possibilities ad not worry about furnitire. But all the stuff about 'dressing' is to do with catching initial interest in a world drowning in information.

Whether people like the interior or not, it is absolutely key in a market where you're more reliant on your online marketing to showcase your house in the photos!

The listing doesn't do that.

You get no sense of the feel of the house in the listing. The floors could be cheap laminate, the kitchen could be from any DIY shed, the furniture may well be expensive but it could be from DFS or Argos, the lack of styling makes it look cheap, in part because (as a PP said) many of these things have been copied. Now it might not feel it in real life, but you won't get that in photos, so the house needs styling to demonstrate that it is high end.

The kitchen jars with the house and the living room leaves me cold.

Did you say upthread you removed the fireplace? Huge mistake. The one in there is more akin to a modern house.

Picture rails would look better in dark wood (or painted a dark colour) and the floor in there is too light it really looks like laminate in the photo. As others have said the remaining period features you do have are lost.

I’ve seen the Rightmove link now, and the picture quality is really odd.
Like taken on a crap old phone.
You definitely need a new agent.
One who can also write a better blurb selling the features.

I do agree with other posters re maybe toning down the walls in the kitchen.

As I said before, good luck. You’re taking these comments very positively (and they are all intended to help!). And hopefully they will help you secure a new sale.

Can people viewing homes on the internet really not see past decor they don't like? You will bring your own furniture with you and put the furniture where you want it, surely the vibe not being how you want it will be fixed purely by decorating how you want and putting your own furniture in?

I think most buyers can but especially at the moment when you are restricted from viewing multiple properties the staging can completely change the way a photo looks. If you have big pieces of furniture or a modern kitchen at the centre of a photo then you aren't seeing the period features.

Sorry @GXDavid have only seen the video now... I would hunt down your estate agents and give them the bollocking of their lives, zooming in on amateur, out of focus photos with flash reflections on windows?!? Outrageous, I think I did better art projects in school. A good video tour is standard nowadays, with a professional camera that photographs 360 degrees of the entire house. Should be the bare minimum service they give you. I would be really angry about that, genuinely un-sells the house and is behind a joke

I often find the obsession with contents on here a bit odd and I factually quite like your kitchen but the decor looks like a modern house, so if I were doing my usual quick run through RightMove I would click through, see the photos, and think it was a newish build exec home and not look further - lack of bedroom photos etc would make me think it was just boxy en-suites etc.

The lighting is odd. Small shades in the middle of the room and nothing else. It looks like it needs rewiring (although you said that it's been rewired? to have more lights, perhaps on the walls as well as the ceiling and their are no table lamps.

I think you have sucked the soul out of that house. I wish it had original features left.

The remaining period features you do have are lost

Thinking about it further, I'm not actually sure that the few period pieces are a good idea in the context of the renovations. I've just sent this to as estate auctioneer I know, and he said they look, "Not so much period pieces as Persimmon pastiche"

With such an extensive modernisation, it can sometimes be worth going the whole way instead of the mix and match approach (though maybe keeping just a couple of things as an amusing hint to its history)

@Disfordarkchocolate is absolutely spot on!

It's sadly modern. Like opening a beautiful box of chocolates to find only the ones you don't like are left.

The estate agent's website is really irritating and doesn't seem to show any interactive photos - just the brochure. It's impossible to view on the phone.

Good grief I've just watched the 'video tour' which isn't, is it!? It's a weird PowerPoint of the photos they've already posted as stills. All our local agents do an actual video tour - literally the agent walking round with a video camera and filming each room and the garden. They do this for all properties, whether they're a 2 bed bungalow or a Manor house. For sale or for rent. So important, especially with covid restrictions.

I'd be very unhappy with their standard of work if this was my house!

I was interested when you said Arts & Crafts style, and the location. Then you said modernised and my heart sunk.

That was once a beautiful house with character. Sadly it is just a big space, full of nothing much.

I want an Arts & Crafts house, I love them. But what you have there looks like all the newbuilds. You need to wait for someone who wants a big empty space with no original features.

You need better pictures. Are these the estate agents? They're not brilliant.

Pictures of all the bedrooms. But please, dress the beds properly, so you're selling a lifestyle. Beds can look great in photos with white or pale bedlinen. That dark, badly arranged bed distracts from the rest of the room.

Simply search the word "bedroom" on Google images to see what an aspirational bedroom should look like!

Your bedroom is grand for real life. But for photos, you need to sell a lifestyle. I don't think I actually ever make my bed (why bother with a duvet?! ) but when selling my house I went out a bought a nice white quilt for the photos as I wanted the room to look light and airy in the pictures. And it did.

I don't know who Gerard or his cross is, or where they are but I think it's a lovely house. However I am used to looking at beat up semis (and houses too ) so I am less picky. I actually really like the colour of the kitchen.

@HardAsSnails

I was expecting it to have some arts and crafts character or heritage inside but it looks like it's all been stripped away to make way for an identikit modern interior.

At that price the garden should be landscaped or at least thoughtfully and attractively planted.

It's a shame, it's a lovely looking house from outside.

This is exactly what I was thinking.I love the Arts and Crafts period,but this is modernised,minimalist,not in keeping. And if I were buying that kind of house at that price I'd be expecting a proper garden,not just a bit of grass - though at least it gives the new owner a blank slate!

For the money, it looks pretty ordinary house in an ordinary street. The photos somehow make the rooms look squashed? Low ceilings?

The photos I can see show lovely rooms, but there are not enough photos.

I will totally admit though that I don’t know the area. £1.5m here would buy much more house & much more land.

I live in GX and bought my property through Frost.

If they're not buying a new build McMansion, people in the area do tend to like arts and crafts exteriors and modern interiors.

With an understanding of the market, I'd request Frost to completely rephotograph the house. Their brief should be to sell a lifestyle, show quality, as many good rooms as possible, original features, light, size and heart/atmosphere. These are missing currently.

The description could be improved to emphasise these things and location too.

Good luck.

Bad estate agent - everyone has given really good advice.

I think some of these posts are getting a bit snipey and nasty but thank you for all the more constructive replies. All the original features were retained apart from the Crittal windows which were drafty as hell. As a 1928 house it was designed in an Arts and crafts style with beams over some of the windows, simple skirting, a decorative oak door, black external beams and trims, tiled window sills, etc. but it was built a bit too late to have some of the other features that the earlier houses had. I do appreciate some of the dressing suggestions and have spoken with the agent about refreshing some of the pictures plus putting some feature pictures on the site. I am not sure why it is not showing on Rightmove.

Thanks again everyone.

Cheers,

David