Bridging the Gap between Real Estate and Interior Design

Want to elevate your real estate game with the power of interior design? Join us in this episode as my brilliant co-host, the licensed realtor and interior designer Ashley Acra, and I share how we're blending real estate with the art of styling spaces. We talk about everything from comprehensive home renovations to deciding on those final accessory touches that make a house a home. Plus, learn why staging is no longer just an add-on service but a vital tool to boost property resale value.

In the second half, we dive into a whirl of colors, fabrics, and textures as we unwrap our interior design and staging services further. Highlighting our innovative design boards, Ashley and I demonstrate how these function as a visual aid for clients, helping them envision their dream spaces. We also talk about how our professional imaging service and click-through links act as a bridge, connecting our clients to their potential homes. Finally, take a peek into our creative journey, from the first meeting to the sublime moment when we reveal the final design. Ashley shares her passion for transforming spaces, and together, we reflect on the joy and value we bring to our clients. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more insightful episodes!

Thank you for listening! Please contact me if I can ever be of service:

Roni Haskell
www.thatSCrealestatechick.com
843.297.1935
roni.haskell@kw.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I am joined today by my very own teammate, a licensed realtor and interior designer extraordinaire, Ashley Acura. Join us as we talk about how we are revolutionizing our business offerings with interior design. I am Ronnie Haskell, otherwise known as that SC real estate chick, and this is for the love of real estate, Ashley. I'm so glad that you joined me. Good morning, yes, and when I say that you are my teammate, you in essence are. You are on my team here at Keller Williams Real Estate and you come with experience. You're newer to the low country, but you're not newer to design or to real estate. You transferred here from Virginia. We are warmly welcoming you into our community here in Somerville.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 0:56

It's been wonderful, well good, and your family does, in fact, live here. You've got children invested into schools here. I've enjoyed the last six months or so of getting to know you and your family. We've had some good times together, thank you, yeah, it's been great so far, well good. Well, you came to me licensed already here in South Carolina, so we've put you to work with some buyers and sellers, but we also find incredible value as an interior designer as well, and you've got a lot of experience in Virginia working with clients in interior design. Tell us about your background.

Speaker 2: 1:29

So this has been a lifelong hobby for me and to be so bold to say it's a natural instinct for me. And I found, as a young mom you know, spending a lot of time at home with my kids that I was more aware, I guess, of our surroundings and how I wanted to feel inside my home. And anytime we would have friends come over or play dates, things like that, folks would always make comments on how comfortable my house felt, but how organized it felt, or, aesthetically, how nice and warm and inviting it was, and they would often ask if I could just come over and give them some tips. And so, you know, those kind of new friend interactions and play dates turned into opportunities to create a business out of my art, and that's truly what it is. To me, it's an art Well we all.

Speaker 1: 2:28

We share the commonality and the belief that we everyone deserves to love where they live. Yes, absolutely, and we can do that by creating spaces that are warm, inviting, friendly, comfortable. It doesn't have to be such a sterile environment and everything placed you know so perfectly that people can't enjoy it. But people deserve. When they buy a new house, say, they kind of have this vision of what they want, but they don't always know how to get there, and so we can help with that, and we're going to talk and elaborate more on that here in a moment as well. But we can also help sellers as they are preparing for capitalizing on the highest net gain, and we're going to elaborate on that as well here in a moment. So we have titled our business style to design right, and so you've already been meeting with some clients and helping them do that. Tell us about one of your experiences.

Speaker 2: 3:27

Well, there's a wide spectrum of needs design-wise. Some people are looking for full home renovations, top to bottom. Some are looking for updates. Some just need to know what pillows and throws and accessories to complete their space. I've been able to touch base with a lot of different folks, giving opportunities for us to develop and grow style to design in a way that allows us to meet needs of many clients of different kinds. I think style and style needs and home functionality is so unique that everything we do I have realized that we have some kind of set standards, set expectations for what our service options are. We will always customize everything to our clients' needs to make sure that what we're doing is never cookie cutter.

Speaker 1: 4:25

Yeah, and we can do larger scale. We can do smaller scale. I know that there was a lady recently that reached out to me wanting some design services. She works from home, she has left the corporate world, she works from home now and she, too, feels like she needs a refresh of her space right, and so you're assisting her, and I think you're also involved right now with helping someone with their child's bedroom, and so yeah, whatever the kitchen renovation that's gonna be starting soon. Good Another client.

Speaker 2: 4:57

In fact I sold that client her home, yes, and so she said I love everything except the kitchen, can you help? And I said yes, I can.

Speaker 1: 5:05

So let's talk about. So that is kind of a big spectrum of design services, but when we really start boiling it down to, how can we serve, the concept is is, how can we serve sellers right out of the gate, right? So, staging a property, let's dive into that conversation a little bit deeper, because National Association of Realtors actually states that you can gain up to 13% more on the sale of your home if it is staged, and so we've got design boards that are clickable links so we can look through a whole. It's really hundreds of different boards online.

Speaker 2: 5:48

It's really thousands when you think about it, because each of those boards can be modified or customized to the client specs.

Speaker 1: 5:55

So the client, the seller, has to do nothing. They just have to say we want your team to help sell our house for the highest net gain in the shortest amount of time. Right, absolutely. From there we can take it to the step of selecting a board, and then we will virtually stage their property. Or, if they would like for us to, we can even follow the click through links, order the furniture and furnishings in and stage that room. For a true success, either the buyer that can then buy the furniture, or the seller now has this new room of furniture and accessories that they will love, carrying it onto the next property.

Speaker 2: 6:39

Well, and given our market too, we have a lot of buyers that come in looking for a second home or come in because of a relocation, and they don't necessarily have all the furniture to fill the new home. So the buyers can find such value in having this furniture already staged and helping them to visualize this space as a place they can live. But then they also don't have to go out and buy everything and wait for it to show up and figure out how to arrange it in the room.

Speaker 2: 7:10

Yeah, so that it's a value to the buyers, but it is such a value to the sellers too, because the sellers have a little bit of leverage With the I would venture to say huge leverage.

Speaker 2: 7:23

And they are going to naturally attract more buyers right out the gate because with virtual staging they're gonna have all these people who are looking on Zillow and looking on realtor. They're gonna have that attraction right away and you know, eat that. And that's just with virtual staging. And then if we take those products that we virtually staged with and place them in the home, those buyers come through the home and we have just doubled the likelihood that they are gonna make an offer because they can actually See how a cohesive collection of elements in this space turns this dwelling Into a home you nailed it, it is.

Speaker 1: 8:01

It's. It takes it from just a house To a home, and we do have to look at when we stage a property. We want to, we want to use neutral Product that really is gonna be well liked by a very diverse group of people and people that are moving to the low country. Oftentimes they have older furniture or heavy dark woods and they just want to get rid of it. Right, and they are moving to the low country where it's light and bright and airy, and so when we stage a product or virtually stage a product house with these neutral tones, now it's a huge, diverse group of people, that buyer pool that we're we're marketing to, and people Can see living in it, they want to live in it.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Think of a builder who has model homes. Right, though, you have designers come in and stage those homes to be attractive, and so that's essentially exactly what we're doing. Let's talk a little bit more about the boards, and so we have them categorized into all of these different groups, and so give us an example of some of the different groups, and within each of those groups are hundreds of board selections that we can order from. But we've got Well you name. Oh, I mean, there's just just for an example.

Speaker 2: 9:18

There's a collection we have a kind of a tiered structure for our in-home Staging and customized design board sections. We can use your existing furniture and Add soft furnishings to that to create a cohesive space. We can start from the ground up, finding furniture, flooring, wall paint, you know ceiling fixtures and all the soft furnishings. Or we can go even deeper and once you've ripped up all the sub floors and tore out all the cabinets, we can help you visualize a complete renovation. They say kitchens and bathrooms sell a home. Yes, well, so do front elevations and we have boards for all three things. So if a seller wants to take the house that they bought in 1989 and then remodeled in 1992 and then never again, and put it on today's market and they want to attract today's buyers, they're going to need to update in order to get the value out of that home right. So we can help them visualize a neutral, market, buyer friendly kitchen that they maybe wouldn't have picked on their own but that is going to draw in tons of today's buyers.

Speaker 1: 10:30

They can choose from modern, traditional. We even have luxury, a whole section that's just luxury. So whatever the price point is, coastal is a big thing around here.

Speaker 2: 10:40

Coastal is a big favorite that we've been shopping from.

Speaker 1: 10:43

So within whatever the segment is of the house, right If it's a traditional colonial style.

Speaker 2: 10:52

We've even got contemporary bohemian eclectic. I mean we've got tons of general options that we then dive right in and customize for that client.

Speaker 1: 11:01

Yes, yes, so, but you brought up the renovation piece as well. So we're talking about staging a property for a seller to attract a bigger buyer pool. Another segment of our business that we can also do is we can take a kitchen and existing and you alluded to this earlier you can take an existing old kitchen. We can swipe that kitchen clean and show it as a brand new white shaker style cabinet with a beautiful hood over a brand new range. So we don't even have to pick up a hammer to do it. No, we just take the image that the professional photo the photographer has taken for us. We will take it. We will swipe the existing kitchen, put in the beautiful brand new kitchen and then we can blow that image up and place that into the home. We can take that image and put it into the MLS as a representative of what that kitchen will look like once it's renovated.

Speaker 2: 12:00

Absolutely. We don't have time to do that renovation before the date that they need to get it on the market. It could take months.

Speaker 1: 12:09

It would take months.

Speaker 2: 12:10

But then buyers don't have to be without the value. They don't have to walk into this handyman special or this fixer upper and then turn around and leave because they just don't know where to start with the renovation. We've already given the sellers the value of having that designed kitchen prominently displayed in their outdated kitchen and give buyers an inspiration, a reason to get excited about what that kitchen could be, and then we can meet up with that buyer, since nothing's been ordered yet, and we can customize that.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Maybe they didn't love the white. They wanted to do dark on top and white on bottom. We can customize that to whatever their style preferences are. But the seller has reaped so much value now because these buyers have an inspiration that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Speaker 1: 12:55

So incredible value from a seller standpoint. Right, and the seller has to do nothing. Between you and I, we do it all. We take the photography, we pick out the board. The seller can be involved if they would like to be, but they don't have to do any of it. We use our creative flair, we use our resources that we have within Style by Design, and we just roll it out, and that's the value of our expertise.

Speaker 2: 13:23

They get the freedom that comes with being able to say I know, you know what you're doing, make this work. Yes, and I spend time looking at the elevation of the house, looking at the room structures to make sure that whatever we're presenting is cohesive and appropriate for that home. Not every design style fits every dwelling. It's just not possible.

Speaker 1: 13:46

You know, it's been very relevant to our market as well. We've been getting a lot of investors for either short-term rentals or corporate rentals, and when somebody's coming in making that investment, they need to state they need to furnish the home very quickly. These resources that we have to offer with click-through links we can also quickly, and when we're saying click-through links, a lot of this is coming from Amazon. We're some of the other West Elm.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Yeah, let me explain that a little bit. So the click-through links are essentially just the link to the sourcing work that I've done, and they could be anything from Serena and Lily to Wayfair. It could be Amazon to Restoration Hardware, depending on the budget and the design style that we're working with. We can make sure that the client receives a beautiful product. In any budget.

Speaker 1: 14:44

Yes, so say you were on the lower end of that spectrum. A room may cost you what? $35,000, $5,000? Yeah. Or you can, like you were saying, go to the Restoration Hardware, the luxury segment of our click-through links and your bet alone is going to be $5,000.

Speaker 1: 15:01

And then we're going to be, but for the right corporate rental that may be very Apple-able. Oh, absolutely, Absolutely, Absolutely. And so, no matter what the budget is lower end, higher end we can select the board, do the click-through links, have it drop ship to the house or here to the office, and then we can take it to the property and set it up. And again, the owner can be as involved with that as they want to be, or they can hire us just to oversee the whole project.

Speaker 2: 15:29

Absolutely. Our job is to not just create a beautiful product, but to make this process as easy for the client as humanly possible.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Here's what's the interesting thing is, in the 22, almost 22 years that I've been in this business, I don't know of another real estate company, another real estate team, and I could be in our market, in our market that's doing this, and so I've asked around. No one does. I don't know if anybody that's doing this to this magnitude, with hundreds and thousands of options for click-through links to create spaces and a great space to turnover time.

Speaker 2: 16:06

That's a key too. They don't have time. People who bought Airbnb's they need to make their money back quick. They don't have time for a large firm to take six weeks to pull some swatches together and then order and then install. We can get things done inside of a week. That's impressive.

Speaker 1: 16:25

It's what we do and it's impactful. It's impactful for the client on the other side of it, because we understand that time is a value as well.

Speaker 2: 16:33

It's not just about money. There's so many more goals in this process, and time is so incredibly valuable, and time equates to money for a lot of people, and so we want to make sure that our value, that we offer, isn't just maximized in the products that we bring to their front door or the digital designs that we deliver to the email, but that it enhances their lives in other ways too. It saves them time, it saves them stress and it gives them a reason to come back. And they buy their next home. And what are we to try to get them? Or?

Speaker 1: 17:06

recommend their friends, their relatives. We're not the best marketing.

Speaker 2: 17:11

It is.

Speaker 1: 17:12

And so we do appreciate that. So my degree is in interior design. I came out of college that's what moved me to Charleston was the design field. I sat in design for a short period of time before segueing over into real estate, but it has never left me. I've always had this passion and I've always been able to advise my clients, especially my sellers, how to stage the property for the best possible gain and results. However, this opportunity and this partnership that I have formed with you, ashley, is taking this to the next level for these clients, both sellers and buyers, investors equally. So I'm just so glad to be in business with you and I look forward to being able to serve more of our clients. And if there is any question from the public as to how to reach us, they can go to that screalestatecheckcom and we are all over social media, but really, if you go to that website, that screalestatecheck, then it will take you to a link where you can make an appointment and it would be a. It's a free 30 minute consultation with you.

Speaker 2: 18:19

And we can do it over Google Meet. I can meet you at a coffee shop, I can stop by your house, but essentially what? What we do at that first meeting is to kind of explain how our process works for me, to hear a little bit about your project and how we can help you, and then just talk about whether or not this would be a good fit for you. And if it is, we'll get together in your home or in the space that we're going to be designing or styling, and then we'll take our time, we'll talk about style preferences, we'll take measurements, we'll take pictures and we'll really nail down what the final product is going to be. And then it's all out of your hands and on my shoulders and I'm happy to get to work. I I wake up running to this kind of thing every day. This is my joy and my passion, and I'm so happy to be able to serve other people with it.

Speaker 1: 19:05

Well, I can tell that it is, and I look forward to continue business with you, ashley. Thank you for joining us today. I appreciate it, thank you. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to click the bell so that you get notified for more podcasts, and I look forward to seeing you next time.