“A room is a still a room, even when there’s nothin’ there but gloom. But a room is not a house – and a house is not a home.”
Luther Vandross’ soulful classic about a lost love may as well have been about the current, loveless methods being used to sell real estate these days.
We live in an era when the way in which a property is staged can be just as critical as its price and location, and when the mind-numbing minutiae of the modern homebuying process distracts us from the real purpose of buying a house – to build a home.
Too often, we think of houses as products – a collection of rooms, furniture and appliances thrown together to create a place to live. These products are categorized by size, number of bedrooms, location and price. But together, none of those descriptors adequately captures a home’s essence, or what differentiates it from the comp down the street.
A home is made of memories and emotions, of thoughtful and personal touches overlooked during open houses or callously trampled during a staging process meant to sterilize and remove almost all personality from a given property.
To a degree, we can understand this mentality. After all, today’s homebuyers want to know they are buying their own home – not moving into someone else’s personalized property. But there’s a difference between moving into a new home with a clean slate, and scrubbing clean all of the elements that can and do make that home unique for owners past, present and future.
So we were heartened to learn of a new website for properties in Australia that aims to put personality back into the too-sterile residential market.
Conventional wisdom in the U.S. would have us believe that the goal is to remove any trace of current homeowners from the sales experience, lest seemingly poor decorating taste or quirky furnishings turn off a potential buyer. But the recently launched website ipostcodes.com.au turns this notion on its head, allowing current Australian homeowners to participate directly in the marketing of their home.
The idea is that any real estate agent can take care of all the usual stuff – knowing a house’s rough square footage, number of bedrooms etc. – but only the homeowner knows the fun and quirky facts about their property that make it a home, and not just a house.
Think that window in the kitchen looks out of place? It might not look so strange when you learn it was strategically installed by the previous homeowner because when opened, it perfectly catches the wafting aroma of fresh pastries from the bakery down the street.
Considering removing that towering tree in the backyard that looks like it might be a pain come autumn, when the leaves fall and need to be raked? Perhaps, but on hot summer days, it perfectly shades the back deck, which otherwise would be too exposed to the blazing summer sun to be enjoyable.
Got pets? Well, maybe one house is closer than another to a well-frequented local dog park, a fact missed during a formal walk-through.
This kind of intimate knowledge is sadly missing from today’s all-business, no-pleasure property listings. But this Australian venture proves it no longer needs to be removed from the process, and indeed, can significantly add to it.
We have become too consumed by the cold numbers of the housing industry – how many sales, at what price and in what zip code – and Banker & Tradesman has perhaps been more guilty of this than most. Our focus on gloomy housing statistics has come at the expense of what really matters in the residential market – creating homes for the families upon whose backs this country’s growth will depend.
Truly, a house is not a home. And a homebuyer is not a statistic. We are all too happy to have been reminded of this by our Australian friends.
