The COVID-19 Chapter, “At Home”: DAY 9
Waiting for the shoe to drop – and sending messages of support! Is shelter in place coming for Maryland? I’m letting clients know we care, and I’m enhancing my property listings with virtual staging by Monument Sotheby’s International Real Estate. Which is actually quite fun.
FIRST OF ALL
A message from all of us at Monument Sotheby’s International Realty:
And welcome to Day 9 of hunkering down. Which, for me, was not a day of staying at home at all. Today I’m wearing my Realtor hat, and getting Real about what’s coming, and what that means for me as an agent – for my sellers, and for buyers out there, who despite this stupid virus, are still looking to buy a home.
I’m getting super tweaky, and feeling that a much stronger imperative to stay home, for real, is headed our way. Don’t quote me – I don’t really know anything. I just see what’s happening in other states not so very far away – and it feels like the inevitable is coming. So in an effort to ward off my waves of nausea and cold sweats, I thought I’d get busy.
My brokerage is awesome, and the leadership is supporting us all (Realtors and Clients alike) beautifully. They have given us a lot of creative and innovative tools and marketing messages, which I am more than happy to utilize and distribute. In an effort to be helpful, I am all in with the message, and I’m putting the tools to work to keep things moving along. I do better when I can keep busy, and focus on something real.
So today – I set off to visit a couple of my listings, to help make them visible and tangible, without the actual touching.
Sotheby’s International Realty has created a nifty little app called CURATE. It captures the dimensions of a vacant space, and magically populates it with virtual furnishings. I’ve always thought it was a neat gimmick – but because the discerning eye instinctively knows the staging isn’t “real”, I’ve leaned toward using furniture you can sit on. Unless it’s a blow up mattress on milk crates, then you shouldn’t sit on – Pro tip.
Today, however, seems the perfect and suitable time to give it a test drive. Tools like CURATE might just benefit our sellers and buyers greatly, in a world of scary viruses, by providing a completely safe and good looking option for viewing property. While not completely perfect, I think some of these turned out great.
It dawns on me this would have been far more effective with before and after shots – perhaps I’ll get back and capture the before’s soon. In the mean time – here are some after’s!
Pretty cool. So thanks, technology, for letting me help my sellers get their homes visible to the public in a world where being in public isn’t good for us. And hopefully, the buyers who are sitting at home and clicking through listings will get a better idea of the potential these vacant homes out there have for them.
I look forward to the day we can all meet at a property, shake hands, touch cabinets, and sign contracts. It will happen, it must. I fear it might not happen for a while, though. In the mean time, we’ll lean on Virtual Reality in the Time of Coronavirus.
Stay healthy!
