Frankfurter Allgemeine
Frankfurter Allgemeine
This article was published in one of Germany's biggest newspapers. The concept of styling is still fairly new in Germany when it comes to real estate. At Fantastic Frank we are happy to represent this new breed of real estate agents using styling for better business.
The room is almost empty except for four rubber boots: a big and a small pair, they stand very close to each other in front of the wide open door through which sunlight falls directly onto the shoes. This still life warms the observer's heart, especially when she/he has small children and is looking for a new nest for the family. Here, on the sunny side of Berlin's urban life, your shoes might soon be standing, the photo seems to whisper. Flowers that decoratively lose a few leaves, a few chestnuts collected by a child's hand, a rumpled bed: all this is shown by this real estate ad for an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg in a reduced, Scandinavian look, reminding of interior blogs or glossy magazines. How big are the rooms exactly? Whether this apartment has a built-in kitchen or how it is heated, you will not learn. What remains is a sense of life - and the implicit promise to buy a piece of urban lifestyle with this apartment.
The real estate brokers have now discovered what product advertising has been proving for years: it is not possible to sell what convinces the head, but the heart. Especially in the big cities, three-room-kitchen-bathrooms are no longer advertised just all empty with a few mobile phone photos, but emotions are generated. "We want to market the apartment as a lifestyle product. For that we have to touch the buyers. Pictures are everything, "says broker Nico Richter of Fantastic Frank. The Swedish company, which also has an office in Berlin and soon in Düsseldorf, is pushing emotionalization to the extreme. Fantastic Frank is the answer of the real estate market to the imaginative generation of Instagram, which no longer reads from line to line to take up information, but wipes from photo to photo on the smartphone.
In order to transform four walls into an object of desire, they are equipped, staged by home decorators, so-called home stagers and then photographed by professional fashion or interior photographers. Often you can not see much of the rooms, but the details: the stylish ceramics, the bicycle, the kale on the kitchen counter. It is important that everything looks perfectly imperfect, as if someone had just sat at the table and sipped on the tea cup. Everything is in tune with the target group that will most likely be interested in this property. "When I offer an apartment, I already know who is going to buy it," says Richter. That's why there are children's shoes in the four-room apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, art is hanging on the wall in the Charlottenburg Bel Etage, and the furnishings in the three rooms in Schöneberg are evidently aimed at a gay couple.