Use Australia’s favourite furniture styles to help sell your home

Recently, designer furniture store Brosa conducted a survey that reveals Australia’s favourite furniture styles.

The results not only reveal what furniture styles are trending now, but also what’s on the horizon. It’s great for getting more informed about on-trend furniture and helping those keen to refresh their home this year.

But there’s another benefit to these findings: helping homeowners who want to make a meaningful and important impression on prospective buyers. We all know styling is so important when selling a home, so why not use our state by state furniture style preferences to guide your home refresh…

Firstly, what does the survey reveal?

The furniture style survey featured 3,700 respondents from every state and territory in Australia. The results show that our favourite interior décor styles are ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’, a sign that people are fully behind current, clean and minimal design trends.

Here are some other interesting findings:

• Country style is a close runner-up
• Scandinavian makes a top-pick appearance in the ACT
• Younger generations embrace Scandinavian furniture
• Cottage is a classic pick for over 65s

One key advantage of the survey is that the data is broken up by state, gender and age, which creates the ability to hone in on your target market and to decorate your home accordingly.

How can this information be used to help homeowners?

There’s no doubt that furniture plays a role in leaving a valuable impression on potential buyers. It can maximise your ROI and even make or break a sale. In fact, evidence proves that furniture helps set the mood and improves your chances of securing interested buyers by orienting buyers to the purpose of the room.

By drilling down into your state and desired age demographic, you can see which furniture styles are in vogue. For example, if you live in Sydney, you’ll benefit from knowing that modern and contemporary styles proved most popular. However, amongst young city slickers, Scandinavian scored well. Hence, if you’re trying to sell a modern apartment there, you may want to invest in modern Scandinavian furniture and styling.

It may seem odd to buy furniture to sell your home but it’s an effective tactic. There’s even a lucrative industry of home stagers that focuses solely on fixing up your home so its ready for inspections.

The fact is, you’ll have to pack your belongings when you move, so why not invest now in items you know you (and potential homeowners) will love? At Brosa, we get a huge number of customers for this very reason, the most popular products being sofas as these are usually susceptible to the most wear and tear as furniture goes.

What other tips can you provide homeowners?

Brosa’s lead designer Kelly King has a few more simple tips to see you across the line  when styling your home for sale:

Declutter

All clutter must go, end of story. It’s not easy, and it may even require offsite storage (or a nice relative’s garage) temporarily, but it’s well worth the trouble.

Clean and clear surfaces, floors, cupboards and closets equal more space in the eyes of potential buyers, so purge anything unnecessary or unsightly. Even if you have an awesome vintage-chic look going on, rein it in for the sake of appealing to the most number of people.

Make your master bedroom a neutral space

Appeal to everyone with a clean bedroom, free of personal items and clutter. You can’t go wrong with clean, crisp linens, tasteful artwork and a blanket folded at the foot of the bed. If possible, remove family photos. Buyers want to imagine themselves living there, not to put themselves in your shoes.

Get your house sparkling clean

It might sound obvious but all surfaces, from shining floors and gleaming windows to clean counters and scrubbed grout, should sparkle.

Create kerb appeal

This is attracting buzz at the moment. Get the garden looking clean and fresh: weed, replace tired plants, keep things hydrated and work in some colour (some annuals should do the trick). Outdoor furniture is another great touch, helping to show a buyer how they might use the area.

For sale: 51 Helena Street, Guildford, WA

So if you’re thinking of selling your property in the near future, you may want to consider updating your interior décor before the marketing pictures are taken and a trail of wide-eyed prospective buyers traipse through your home.