Just getting started

So far my house-mate has almost been invisible. In the last few days I haven’t seen a soul. She leaves for work early and I don’t see her in the evening. It’s as though I have rented a house for the cost of a room. This means things are a bit quieter than I expected, but there are no fights over who watches what on the telly.

There was a house in the next street to ours in Melbourne that was up for sale. I had a look at the photos of it on the web, and it seemed a tad run down; particularly the kitchen. S went to the open inspection and thought the place was much worse than the pictures showed. It’s good to have a look at the opposition; to help set the price. Don’t just rely on what real estate agents might say. They can be wildly wrong, either setting the price too high or low to suit their own ends.

The kitchen cabinets were pretty bad apparently, but looked mostly okay in the photographs. I wonder if they were touched up. So there’s a concern: how do you advertise your place, which includes photos as well as the description, that shows it off well but doesn’t exaggerate. In some ways the photographer needs to use a wide angle lens to capture everything that’s on offer, but sometimes when you get to a place thinking it was a certain size only to discover the reality is vastly different. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because everyone else does it. Do you do anything to get the punters coming around and risk them being disappointed, or do you adopt a more honest approach and show pictures that are as true as you can get them. I don’t know if there is an answer to that. No one is going to point out the flaws when selling, but I would err on the side of honesty in my descriptions.