Is Your House Award Winning?

Today, I want to talk to you — I want to jump on to Oscar and Grammy fever. I want to talk to you about whether or not your house is award winning.

I recently wrote a piece for realestate.com.au that was all around how to bring a little bit of Hollywood into your home; it was about how to bring that luxe look into your home, catching onto Grammy fever and to Oscar fever.

Recently, I was with a client and I was having a conversation around preparing it for sale.

One of the things that they said to me was, “Naomi, it’s not an award-winning home,” which really hooked on, for me, to this whole awards time that we’re going through.

I think it’s really important and I feel quite strongly about it that when we’re looking to sell our homes, make money out of our homes or have our homes valued, that it’s not about winning awards.

It’s about doing the research and doing the preparation to maximize any investment you make in that home.

For me, it’s really about maximizing the asset that you already own.

It’s about leveraging the property that you’ve already worked so hard to get and it’s about enhancing highlights of that property.

It’s not about creating an award-winning space that would be featured in a magazine,  it’s far from it.

If there are any of you guys who have anything to do with film or TV or magazines, you would know that a way a property is photographed or filmed is very, very different to what it looks like in real life.

Getting your home ready for market is absolutely not about getting ready for any Oscar.

The other thing to keep in mind is you need to think of your property a bit like a movie star in the sense that they’re always working hard to show the amazing parts of themselves and they’re really working hard to diminish their shortcomings.

As a movie actor, there are many, many things that I’m sure they don’t want the paparazzi and everyone else to know about them.

Similarly, when you are putting a house to market, it’s important that you showcase, just like a movie star, all the amazing things about your home, but you diminish and you play down some of the lowlights.

You never hide them because that’s bad karma, but you certainly diminish them.

If we’re trying to catch on to anything with this Oscars fever, the thing that we need to catch onto is about enhancing our highlights and diminishing our lowlights, definitely not about creating award-winning spaces.

Award-winning spaces don’t appeal to everybody.

I guess the main and last thing that I think is important to talk about with this is that it’s about creating spaces that allow people to connect to.

About creating spaces that allow people to, real life people, to connect with.

Everyone can totally unleash and get super-excited about the Oscars, but when you’re looking at it from the perspective of selling, valuing or leasing your house, don’t try and make your house an award-winning house.

Because there’s a pretty substantial chance, unless you’re in a really small band of the market, that you’re actually going to lose money on it.

Again, let’s just embrace our houses for the homes they are.

Let’s enhance our properties, but don’t try and make them award-winning.