The Maths of Home: Elaine Penhaul’s Formula for Property Success

In this compelling episode of The Viking Chat, Kristjan Byfield sits down with Elaine Penhaul, founder of Lemon & Lime Interiors and author of Sell High, Sell Fast, for a conversation that bridges the gap between data, design, and delivery in the UK property sector.

Elaine is a leading voice in home staging, but her message isn’t about soft furnishings and fluff. It’s about strategy - the measurable, evidence-led kind that directly impacts how fast a property sells, who it attracts, and how well it performs in a crowded, emotionally charged market.

Whether you're working with prime homes, rental stock, BTR units, or PBSA developments, this episode is a masterclass in leveraging buyer psychology, spatial understanding, and visual impact to drive results - and why staging isn’t just for sales anymore.

🔎 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✅ Why home staging is still misunderstood - and still underused
Elaine dismantles the tired idea that staging is “dressing a room” with cushions and candles. Instead, she explains how it’s a commercial, data-led discipline designed to position a property at its highest value. It’s not about taste - it’s about targeting.

✅ The ‘Maths’ of Home: Why square metres aren’t all that matter
Too many agents and developers focus on space as a number - but buyers think in flow, in light, and in feeling. Elaine shares how she and her team use layout psychology and demographic analysis to help buyers imagine their lives in a space - and pay a premium for it.

✅ Why BTR and PBSA providers should care about presentation
Staging isn’t just for individual vendors. Elaine unpacks how large-scale operators can use interior strategy to reduce voids, attract the right tenant mix, and protect their brand positioning in a saturated rental market.

✅ From resistance to ROI: The data that proves staging works
We dive into Elaine’s measurable results - faster sales, higher offers, fewer price reductions - and why too many agents still leave money on the table by skipping presentation. Spoiler: it’s rarely the client saying no - it’s often the agent not even suggesting it.

✅ When taste gets in the way: Managing vendors who ‘just don’t see it’
Elaine shares her tried-and-tested approach for navigating difficult conversations, including how to reframe staging as a value-add rather than a criticism. It’s about respect, not redecoration.

✅ Why the first impression starts online - and what most agents get wrong
You’ve got seconds to grab attention. Elaine explains why bad photography, empty rooms, or misaligned furnishings sabotage listings long before the viewing, and how to avoid the most common visual mistakes.

💬 Why This Episode Is a Must-Listen

Whether you're an estate agent aiming to raise your game, a landlord wondering why your property isn’t getting traction, or a BTR provider juggling lease-ups and brand alignment - presentation matters.

And not in a vague, aesthetic way. In a measurable, commercial, margin-improving way.

Elaine Penhaul brings a unique blend of empathy, evidence, and enterprise to a subject too often dismissed as “nice to have.” With her team at Lemon & Lime Interiors, she’s shown time and again how staging isn’t a cost - it’s a strategy. And in the current market, that strategy could be the difference between a 4-week let and a 4-month void.

👂 Who Should Tune In?

• Estate agents seeking differentiation and higher fees
• BTR operators looking to reduce void periods and elevate UX
• Landlords wondering how to reposition tired stock
• Developers preparing homes for sale, showhomes or off-plan
• Property marketers obsessed with clicks, not jus

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to the latest episode of The Viking Chat and I am delighted to be joined today by Elaine Penhall of Lemon and Lime Interiors. Elaine? Hello. Hello. I'd love to be here. Thank you for having me. Welcome to our little back room bougie recording meeting webinar room. So that was for you. Yes. I mean was it the cocktail trolley that gave it away? That was what really gave it away. And the Viking helmet. Yeah, yeah, no you're absolutely right. It's very us. So look, for those out there living under a rock who don't know who you are and what Lemmell and Lyme are, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and your journey to where you are today? Yeah, so I'm founder of Lemmell and Lyme Interiors and we stage premium property right the way across the UK I started the business by accident in 2015. Well, officially in 2015 I've been staging for a fact. How do you start a business by accident? I've started a lot of businesses by accident. It seems to be a theme. What happened? Originally I was married for 20 years to a property developer. He left and I ended up in 2008, 2009, so kind of global crash with a chunk of property which was mixed residential and commercial property and forced more children to feed. I had no idea how to be a landlord or how to sell property or anything else. I'm surprised you didn't do anything for children to look after. So I was working as a business coach at the time. I had my own business. I was doing a lot of culture change work, particularly in UK police forces and suddenly had to get to grips with renting my properties and just learning what worked. Of course it was a time when I couldn't sell anything really for any money because there was no market. Literally no market. And what I found was that the common sense approach of repainting, putting in new kitchens or new bathrooms or carpets where it looked so it needed it was a really good thing to do. So I was doing that for a little while. I then had a close friend moved to Budapest and she rented out her family home or their family home in the same village as I was living at the time and after a couple of years I happened to drive past so I'd moved out of the village by then and it had a for sale sign in the garden and literally the garden was very overgrown and the house looking really sad and I phoned her and said oh my goodness Suzy you can't possibly sell it looking like that I said well I haven't got time to sort it you do it so I gathered together you know your four little children who were kind of teenagers by then and then mates and a few You can paint and a few sticks furniture that we found in various barns that we had. I think stuff's great fun as kids. I mean my parents did stuff up. We bought anything from dated to dilapidated homes and kind of lived in the project. Pretty much. We've been living in projects and so the kids were pretty used to it. So they were very hands-on. We recruited the horse trailer that I had, put furniture in that, delivered that. And that was the winter of 2010, 2011. - Now, the market was just starting to have little snips. - So the market was still pretty horrible, yeah. And the agents achieved 60,000 pounds more than they had ever imagined for it. - Wow. Which is what probably I'm guessing roughly 10% of the overall price? - Yeah, a bit more, a little bit more than 10% price and yeah which was absolutely huge so everybody was delighted in a really tough market in the winter country house so and every single one of your excuses and I'll cross them off yeah yeah completely and we then what happened then inevitably was that the local agents would phone me up and say just come with me and have a look and I would go and have a look and they'd say and I'd and say, you know, well, what do you want me to do? Well, could you tell the owner that I can't possibly sell it looking like that? And they would give me a whole list of reasons. - 'Cause they wouldn't want the agents to be the ones saying your home, Darson. - I don't want to upset any of it. - Great, yeah. - I don't want to lose the instruction. - Yeah. - So, that was what I started to do. And eventually I thought, they ought to be paying me for this. (laughing) - I love it. They weren't even offering that yet. - No, not at all, no, they just thought that it was something I might quite like to do. Yeah, yeah. - I mean that said, before we start the call, we did say, you know, "Beg steal, borrow." - Absolutely, absolutely. - Get what you can. - Definitely, "Beg stealing, borrowing." And of course, you know, looking back on it, I mean, for a start, I was business coach at that point. That was what I was doing, and I was learning an awful lot of ways of saying, "Oh my goodness, you can't possibly sell it looking like that," because of course, you know, all my training in my business coaching world my experience said that what I had to do was to sit down and say, "So you're going to list your house for sale. So tell me about what your goals are. What are you hoping to achieve by moving?" And we would very much go into a business coaching world. And so then by landing conversation. - It's kind of using the skill sets you already have, really, in that respect. - Yeah, completely. So then I was able to say, "Well, what are you looking at? What are you noticing about the things that you're looking at? Where do you think yours measures up to what you really are falling in love with and then it was an easy conversation and still now you know we use a lot of that skill set in the business where people are telling me what they think needs to. And it's about it's about getting them to break that protective kind of thing of their home. You've decided to sell. Interestingly I think that the protective be it around how their own looks. In probably 75% of cases is a misconception that lives in the head of an estate agent. Likewise, the misconception that people don't want to spend any money on a home that they're moving out of to get the best price. Yeah, I think it's interesting, is there? I put all of this in a similar wheelhouse of agent fees, right? Oh, of course, any seller is just going to want to use the agent that uses the sales at the lowest price because that's how they save the most money. And as you and I know, in every good estate agent out there in the world knows, it's a complete false economy. Quality agents who charge a fair and reasonable rate for their expertise and services, achieve higher prices, they have better conversion rates, they have far lower full throughs of sales, they have shorter sales times, you know, all of the above. And like you said, when people are moving, it's often not this very simple thing of, "Oh, I just want to sell and buy." You know, for one person, the price is important, the other person, it's not missing out on the dream home that they've finally got their hands on or it's a family emergency or whatever it is there's different pressures in every situation. Yeah yeah and I do think that and it's borne out really by the evidence that we collect because we've tracked data on where our leads come from for example in the business from day one and in 2015 the first set of data that I after the first year, suggested that less than 1% of our leads were coming directly from a homeowner. In 2021, as we came out of Covid, that had gone up to about 30%. We put that down to the fact that people were watching more programmes on tele that there was more stuff on social media, for example, and that that was what they were noticing. So they were then coming to us. And we fully expected that that would drop back a little bit. - But it's gone up, isn't it? - But now 52%, in the last year, 52% of our leads have come from the homeowner direct. And I think that's a number of things. I think partly it is social media, it is trends that people are seeing on television, on everywhere that they're looking, things like selling sunset, buying London, everybody's talking about staging. We were featured on Britain's most expensive houses. All of those things puts that at the forefront of a seller's mind when they come to sell. And many of those we know from the conversations that we have are saying to their estate agent, what can I do about the presentation of my home in order to maximize my sale? However they frame that, but that's the question. And many estate agents are too scared to say, right, you need to paint the walls, you need to change the carpet, You need to sort out the data decor. You need to tidy up the garden. You need to declutter. Many of them will say, well, maybe you could move the family photos. And that's the end of the conversation. And the intelligent, well-educated seller who is looking out there on social media and seeing, perhaps not going to cut it. And the next thing that happens is that they're on the end of the phone to us or dropping us a message or similar businesses, but they're looking for staging. They're not now going to list with the agent that's said to them I'm going to charge you 1% and your house is beautiful because they know that that's not going to get them Yeah, in many many cases, but there's still there's still a gap Between what the estate agent believes the sellers thinking and what the seller believes that they're actually Yeah, seller is actually thinking and I don't think that gap, you know, I wrote the last book and sell your house to try and bridge that gap. I don't think that it's I don't think that gap is yet bridged. I think the two sides are very often having your completely different conversation With a completely different yeah, I think it comes back to that thing if you know agents if you really know your stuff Own it. I mean it's something You know, I mean it's prevalent in letting them say it's the easiest way to land an instruction is overvalued Right, so I think that is the first stop for any quality agent where you refuse to play that game, where you go, "I don't care what flashy McPants down the street has told you it's worth or half a percent dot com has told you, I know you're looking about this and I know that if you price it above this, you won't get the interest that's going to get you the let or sale that you need. And it starts with that, but like you said, owning that conversation. I mean, you and I have just, we're working on a little side project together. We've just come down from a substantial two bed that we're doing a complete refurb on, you know, and that was a really interesting journey, that flat, because we've, we've let and managed that flat for about 20 years, 1920 years for the owners, almost the entire time base has been running. And in that time, it's always let pretty well, not really had to spend much on it. The development was built about two years earlier. So the building of Flat itself is only 22 years old. But yeah, you know, we took it to market about six to eight weeks ago, and nothing got nothing. And it's normally a flat we are swatting people away because you saw it massive living room, massive private roof terrace which is unheard of in central Shoreditch and nice bedrooms and everything else. But I hadn't actually been up there, I think the last times we had in there had been there for like the last four years and I went up there took one look around and was like this has got to come off the market. It's too tired, too dated but then we then started with the gently gently approach, which was what's the minimum our client needs to spend to get this back to presentable? We were like right, well obviously a repaint. Yeah. You know and then we start looking at right, you know, the kitchen's a bit dated, I mean maybe we can just kind of tart it up. And by that I mean you know replace the appliances with new ones, maybe put some new door fronts on, similarly with the bathroom, could we put some new fixtures and fittings in, maybe new carpet in the bedroom. But we've learned from trying to do that in the past where we're trying to save the client money because it still wasn't cheap. No. That we're still coming in at probably, I can't remember now, I think it was about 25 grand by the time it was all in the repaint sorting out terraces, like I said, fixtures and fittings and door fronts and all this sort of stuff. But then we've done that in the past and the trouble with that is you start tarting up bits of a property, the bits looked okay before, now all of a sudden, look worn and tired because they're now next to a pristine painted wall or whatever it is. And so we then, we kind of swallowed our tongue a little bit and we did a more comprehensive tart up quote. And then we did a full, full refit quote. And actually, I mean, the difference between the two probably about 15 grand in the end. But we went to the client, you know, it was, look, you've bought this flat, you've had this flat for 22 years, you bought it for 450 grand, it's worth about 1.4 million, you've had 22 years of rental income at about four grand a month, so you've done well, and you've only ever, I think repainted it once, replaced carpets once, you know, very little and some bits of furniture and blah blah blah, but very little invested on the flat and we just went, look, given all of that and Renters Rights Act coming in, you know, this kind of rent a tenant-centric marketplace we're coming into and we were like, this is the opportunity now, we do it properly, we reset the property and you know, the project is coming in not massively shy of a six-figure investment, but when you look at it as an overarching asset and what it has returned and what it can continue to return, actually that's a drop in the ocean. Well, and it is exactly that view on investment that's really important, you know, whether you're letting a property or selling a property because that's coming up. got the capital growth on property and you've got the rental income and I know as an ex-landlord myself that those void periods are super damaging to your overall income. If you can get a really good tenant in because the apartment is beautiful and they stay for three, four, five years and you don't have any of the void period, even the odd months while you've got a tenant changing over then it's absolutely worth it. Yeah I mean historically because we stopped doing projects for a while we did projects for quite a while running an entire internal team and we would do everything. Yeah and then that got too much we had a nightmare project which almost broke me it was meant to be six to eight weeks and it was six months. And it was we because we always did investment properties because we're a letting agent Yeah, and that was always our focus. We always did investment properties and that's Actually really nice and clean because there isn't that even even when it's a client's previous home By now most of our clients have been out there long enough They've lost that emotional connection. Yeah, and so it's it's really purely about the numbers You know, we didn't have to drill down into the minutiae of the design We would do a mood board and go this is the aesthetic we want to create and this is our budget And this is our timeline and these are our financial predictions Yeah, and I said we stopped doing the middle because we took on a private home a couple who had always rented and then had obviously come into some money had bought 1600 square foot lateral loft in a converted Bible printing factory Wow which had been horrendously converted in the 1980s and had been chopped and changed in between and all sorts of things and yeah they wanted a bougie apartment for a tight budget and yeah I mean I can see your face all alarm bells ringing we should have run a mile but yeah it was meant to be six to eight weeks and it broke me. I mean literally everything. The whole project was a fight. Turned out the boilers in the building had been installed illegally on like a on a boundary wall. We had the the clients cancel cancel the boiler relocation three times because they'd spoken to a plumber who said the boiler was fine. It was like but they're not fine. Every time I would call up the plumber and go oh you these guys called you about this and you said that and they were like Yeah, and I'd be like did they tell you it was mounted on a boundary wall and that's where the flu went Oh, no, they didn't tell me that no, that's completely illegal. I said thank you very much Can you put that in an email please? I would literally lost a month Wrangling like and we had joys because we had to recite that we had to get freeholder consent We had to run the flu through the common parts of the bill. Oh, it Literally at every turn. - Oh yeah. - We had the clients come in and three times have us remap the lights. And then when we presented them the bill that had trebled for the lights, they went, oh, you didn't tell us that was gonna cost. I'm just like. - It's astonishing, isn't it? People want all these changes and then don't believe that it will have any impact. - You thought that was just happening for free. But anyway, but yeah, that, I'm very proud of what we delivered. It looked incredible. But like I said, it was meant to be a six to eight week project done in our quietest time of year. Ended up being nearly eight months. It went through peak season. So I would get up at six o'clock in the morning, go down to the site, meet the builders, spend two hours on site with the project before hopping in the car up to here. - Yeah, yeah. - So we got out, but we've got, I mean, you met Doran and his car at ProCare upstairs. They're fantastic. We've done a few projects with them now. and actually they will quote and run the project and we oversee the design brief and we will go in and refine the details and run the project. So we charge a reduced fee for a design and project management service that kind of sits on top of them, but enables us to do that. So one thing you and I agree on and I think anyone with a flare for design will feel like this. We are enemies of Magnolia. - Magnolia these days reminds me, my grandmother ran a pub when we were kids. So in the 60s and 70s, and walking into a Magnolia house now, reminds me of walking into my grandmother's house, into my grandmother's bar where all the guys were smoking and the walls were. - Yeah, you got that beautiful tar. - Mm. - Ooh, okay. - I can smell Magnolia. - I can feel my trainers sticking to the carpet. - I'm so tall. - But no, being silly aside, you and I, you know, and there's nuance to this, but we are believers that doing something bland and safe and homogenous is the worst thing really you can do in property. This kind of like, oh, I want it to be a blank canvas people can imagine how they live here. People's imaginations are appalling in the buying line. I think like 10, 15% of people have the ability to imagine what a space could look like. But the rest, the 85, 90% are, you know, they can't even imagine what the sofa would look like if it's over there, let alone, you know, take that wall down and... I'm quite grateful for that. built a business out of that. Yes, got it, great. But these days we're still doing battle with new build developers who think that white walls and grey carpets are going to cut it. And we need to move away from that. There's a difference between neutral, calm and grey. What is it with developers and grey? Well, because it was very fashionable and it takes a long time to move away from one - And it's wades into the next phase. - The premium market on right move. And it's like you've hit a black and white gallery. It is literally all gray carpets, gray furniture, lots of chrome, lots of white. - Yeah, yeah. And it was a trend, you know, kind of pre-COVID. It was definitely a trend. And it takes a long time for some developers to reflect and say, actually that's not what people are looking for now. We are very, very keen to make sure that whatever we're presenting in terms of an interior that's on a listed property, a property that's listed for sale, is directly appealing to the target buyer. So this is the thing, it's going to be right. And we're not to data to drill into that. We were talking earlier off camera about the geodemographic data that we get and we get that both on the postcode specific on both the seller and the buyer of the homes that we work with. Now where we've got that for the buyer, then we're able to then take it and say, well, look, the likely buyer for this property from the data that we've got, which is really very good data, the likely buyer is a young professional couple and what they are currently looking for in trends for interiors are blah blah blah whatever it is whether that's color whether it's there was a lot of natural textures. So like you said we went up to R1 we've done color drenching and all this sort of stuff but equally walks into a Georgian stacking. Yeah if we're looking at a Georgian rector that is absolutely beautiful set in the middle of a very tiny village in the middle of Shropshire, for example, then probably we're not going to know because actually, interestingly, in that type of property, that property had exactly that in the 80s and early 90s, and now in that type of property, sometimes we still see it and it looks very dated. So what's a trend in central Shoreditch, for example, in the middle of Ludlow, in the Georgian rectory, is going to feel very off-kilter. So it's understanding geography, it's understanding the marketplace, it's understanding the trends that are related to the client and also to the property type. And that's really important. We - There's a lot of time in that. - This data-led approach, 'cause you and I were at the Voice of the Agent conference a couple of weeks ago, Unchained Marketing, which was great. And it's this, Simon and his team, and also a lot of the partners there, are desperately trying to wake the property industry up, and particularly the agency industry, to this data-led approach. What's been fascinating in our conversation is you keep on talking about the data tells us this, the data tells us that, you know, 52, you know, from 14% to 33% to 52%, whatever it was. I can't, I can think of very few estate agents or letting agents that could sit and have a chat with me like this and have data at their fingertips like that and who reference a data source. we get this set of data from here and we get this set of data from that. When you talk about it, it's so obvious that we should be doing this. We talk about the value of data and data is your company's gold, whatever it is. But A, you've got your own data, but like you said, B, understanding. said there's no point stylizing a property if you don't stylize it for your typical or predominant buyer. Yeah, we're not interior designers. We're not doing what we do to make it beautiful for the person that's living there. We're not. Well you are interior designers but with an objective. Well we're not. You know my background, I'm a mathematician. My degree is in maths. I'm This is one. Day one. And what I see. So this is already, this is already explaining quite a bit. What I see in property is, beauty is a mathematical concept. So beauty is symmetry, colour is absolutely a mathematical concept in terms of percentages. The whole thing balance, proportion, they're all mathematical concepts. And we are using mathematical concepts with the data to say these are the people. And then of course, you know, I have designs working for me. - The agents you work with must be fascinated in this data, because surely, they're going, oh, hold on, you know that 80% of our buyers are gonna be this kind of profile of person, that's who you stylize it towards. I mean, as an agent, I would wanna know that data so I could stylize our marketing towards that demographic. But, you know, are they a horse and hound person? Do we need to slap this, try and get this as a PR property feature in there, or? I've offered to take real life horses to stage American bands. (laughs) - Amazing. - For those type of properties. But I think what's really, really fascinating is that we've collected data obsessively, some would say, from day one of the business because of my background. And so I knew, I always knew, you know, staging wasn't a trend. It wasn't something that agents did or homeowners did when I started the business. And we've done a huge education. No, I mean, I've stumbled of course, come to the donut, but it does seem quite nichey, very design-led. Yeah, and people believe it's very design-led, but we've done a huge amount of education. I've done a huge amount of education in the UK property market that we're using a property marketing tool and as a marketing tool. And you know, from the conversations with Simon, marketing should be data-led and therefore we've had to be data-led. So we've got data for every single property that we've ever touched. We know how much it costs to stage it, how much it costs to get it ready for market, what it had been listed at pre-staging, if it had in fact been listed or what the valuation was pre-staging, what the eventually the accepted offer was. We did a long-term study earlier this year with using data from 20 EA against our data over nine years. It was nine years because we had 10 years of data. 20 EA, bless them, had nine years of comparable data. We then were able to say that the properties that we've staged across that nine-year period Yeah. A five times more likely to sell at asking price. Wow. You know, right across the regional asking price. That's a rather nice stat to open with. But they're 18% more likely to go over asking and they are seven times less likely to go under asking. Wow. Now, if you compare, so the average under asking, the average selling price from 28 is something like 96.8%. Our average sale price across every property that we've touched in that time period is 103%. So now you've got almost 7% to play with in the staging. And the staging cost is, a big staging cost would be 1.5% where we're fully furnishing. You've still got five and a half percent. That's a good margin even with a good agent in there at two and a half percent. Unfortunately what we're up against is agents and there are many good agents out there. We work with some really really super agents but there are also agents of this kind of ilk who don't really understand their own value and so they can't put a value on what we do for their client because they're already struggling to get to a 1% fee. Yeah. So, where I come in and say, "Well, it might cost, you know, if it's a really good declutter and a style before photos and ready for viewings, it might cost 0.25% of asking, you know, or it might cost a couple of grand, for example." Or, where we're fully furnishing something that is of a sensible sized floor plan, it might cost 1.5%. percent. That's more than my fee. I can't possibly talk about that. Some of our clients spend more on dinner, you know, for a group of friends than we're talking about for this. Yeah, unfortunately, there is still this huge hang up with agents about the value they deliver. But again, you know, we bring it back to data. It's, you know, they don't discuss it internally to reassure themselves as a business of the results they deliver for their clients. They certainly aren't able to convey that to the clients in any way other than trust me, I'm an estate agent. I think that's what's really fascinating. The conference, when we're at the Voice of the Age conference the other week, you can't argue with anything that's being said there. We had everyone there from Heather and Street and Ben Giocaio to you know the CEOs of what do we have their experience you gov yeah everybody you know and and everything was naturally data-focused data-led but even as I am no data scientist or mathematician but I I am a business person and I do like logic and indisputable facts and you just can't argue with the logic and the value to it and yet as an industry we do it so little. We've always had a grasp on certain metrics like we know where our client retention is and we know where our referrals come from and we know what our average tendencies are and voids and rent arrears and all this sort of stuff. Leads, we've always been pretty focused on leads and business generation in terms of applicant inquiries with the portals, which led us to take a primarily data-led approach to leave right-move five minutes ago. But that wasn't an eject. We did it in a very emotive way at the time because it was a reaction to their initial COVID response, which I'm actually grateful for, but because the data had been nudging us, we'd been considering leaving for three or four years beforehand, 'cause we were 90% confident that our data told us everything would be hunky-dory. But yeah, we still needed that nudge, but it was fascinating sitting in that conference. None of us do it enough. I always, talking about glorious writing, we've always bemoaned the amount of agents I've spoken to over the years and still now who bemoan the cost. Oh, can't believe they put the prices up again, blah, and yet I can count on one hand the amount of agents who I've had that conversation with where I've gone, cool, what do you spend and what does it generate? And they can't answer that question. - No. and they don't have the stats in terms of how that compares to other portals if they use them and what that, you know, does it bring them clients and if not, where's their client position from? And, you know, so I've always found that fairly basic, but, you know, as I've said to you, as I've told you straight off the back of this, I'm really excited because we are going into a big two or three hour meeting with Simon Leadbetter and his team from Unchained. I think we've got two or three of the team down because we've paid them to do a full in-depth audit of base and all of our marketing channels, all of our marketing activities. So everything from our brand values and our brand message to our website, our socials, our newsletter, everything we do. We've given them all of our client data, our historical data, so they're doing profiling for us. And you know, and it, I'm I'm delighted that we're doing this now, but I'm bewildered that we've left it 20 years to get to this point to be like, right, come on, marketing, stop willy-nilly-ing it and it's actually applied some science and some logic and some data and analytics rather than just guess what. I think now it's, we have that level of data at our fingertips. You know, property, I love being in the property world. You know, I've worked in a lot of different industries over my long and very patchy career. (laughs) And, you know, what I really love about property is the amount of data that we've got at our fingertips. So if I want to know a particular fact, I pick up the phone to one of the people, you know, either 20A or RightMove, whoever it happens to be and say, "This is what I need. How quickly can you get it to me?" And they go, "Oh yeah, okay. We'll pop it over this afternoon." And I'm going, "Whoa, amazing." So we've got the comparative data for our internal data now as well, which is fantastic. And we can put out all of that messaging. I think that it would be brutal to look back on 20 years of marketing and say, "We didn't do this." I think that they're probably the ability to do what we're doing now didn't exist. I mean the access, no you're right, 20 years ago there wasn't the availability of the data and what was there was incredibly more expensive because we've taken a more open attitude to data and how it's used and leveraged and what small businesses have access to now is on par with your complex 20, 30 years ago. The unique access that they had because of their budget is now afforded to most of us. So, I think your family, we're on such a journey with marketing that we started this tail end of 23, really, because we'd made this decision that it was time for us to change gears a little bit. We didn't go through a rebrand, we knew we wanted to build a new website, we wanted to absolutely commit to video. But we also knew, as with all things in marketing, one essential part of it is consistency. Yeah. It's being like, right, we are going to produce X amount across all of our channels week in, week out. Now, there's obviously going to be the odd thing that drops in and out, but our first mission was consistency. So we built our new website, but I wouldn't have made this investment. We wouldn't have made this investment with Unchained a year ago because I don't think we were ready. No. You know. There's no point. Because we have done this in the past. We have paid for consultants and experts to do XYZ. And then we get this fantastic insightful report and then it just kind of goes in a draw. Yeah. And it doesn't get actioned. We needed to be in a place where we were achieving, we were producing what is required. It just needs refinement. So we've spent a year building that consistency. And now hopefully, what we're gonna hear later today is a lot of refinements to that. You tweak this and think about that, and to produce it like that, adjust keywords here, and whatever it is, and hopefully it's gonna be a bit more refinement. You know, I'm really excited to see what Simon and his team, you know, we're gonna do it in phases. We're gonna look to see what we can deliver internally first, which is a great thing from their reports. They give you a whole list of, you know, here's three months worth of work, or six months of work of stuff you guys can do yourself. So we're gonna start with that, and then hopefully beyond that, start to engage Simon and his team in delivering elements of that. But I'm super excited, Because we've, like I said, we know our internal system data. Ann and I know this business inside out in terms of monthly generation and profit and loss and like I said, general client retention data and arrears and blah, blah, blah, blah, the kind of big ticket items. But we've never developed that marketing knowledge, that marketing insight and that proper strategy on how we want to build and grow the business from there and also how we want to improve results. And I think that's massively something for agents at the moment is to, yeah, we've got to all get better. And the agents that you are seeing doing really well at the moment, you're by designs, you're Chartwell Nobles, you're avocado properties, you're location locations, you know, Swindon home finders, JDG, they are all taking a data-led approach. They are all driving. Yes, they have instincts and ideas, but it is fundamentally driven by data. And it's interesting as well. We talked earlier about value, and I think the agents that can talk about value as opposed to cost are really the ones who these days are succeeding in getting good fees for what they're doing, but fair fees for what they're doing because they'll talk about adding value into what they're bringing. So they're marketing, you know, they can evidence, you know, the difference that they're preparing properly. So the presentation side will make the difference that really great photos or really great video is going to make to that particular property. - I think it tells you a lot about a client, right? It tells you a lot about a client. I mean, we closed our sales department at base five years ago 'cause it was always kind of a bit of an afterthought to our lettings and property management. We never really got that structure there. But one of the things I always found difficult was this whole no-win, no-sale, no-fee attitude with this massive asset. you know, how wishy-washy people could be. And I think for agents, you invest so much time, energy and resources, finding that client, wooing that client, getting that property on, putting it on the market, that, you know, really you want to be sure that they are as committed and serious as possible. And I think what's really interesting is, you know, there are things like your service, like blended fees. I think that's why blended fees is doing really well right now. It's that buy-in, right? You know, if a client is willing to put down one, two, three, four grand on presenting the space right in person, paying for quality marketing assets. Then the likelihood is if they're splashing five grand out up front, they're pretty freaking serious about getting that property sold. Whereas the person who absolutely won't lay a penny out up front and is looking for a 1% agent, they're like no wonder those agents are seeing a higher percentage of fall-throughs and everything else because there's no buying from the client and I think so agents need to kind of shake up their psychology with this stuff of being like yes there may be an added element of complexity of saying look this is what we do but we work the lemon and lime and this is what they can do with us and we work with whoever else. Maybe you work with a marketing partner for premium content like drone footage and stuff. Yes, it's less simple than just walking in and go, "We sell houses for a percent." But if you can sit there and pitch your justified fair fee and justified two other services that cost and you've got a client going, "Great. Your data tells me this is absolutely what I should be doing. So yeah, I'll spend three there and an extra grand in your marketing and a grand to get it sale ready. And off we go. You know, the experience you're going to have with that client. I mean, you know, you're going to be taking that property to market in the best possible way. So you should get the best outcome from your viewings and you know, you've got a committed client who's willing to spend money up front. So you know, I think for agents, it's again, it's getting away from this, this volume, right? Whenever you build a business on volume, I think you're constantly in that hamster wheel of chasing the next listing just to keep the books full and to keep that kind of funnel of price reductions and everything else rolling through. But actually, you can have a much calmer business by being content with doing less volume, less instructions, but at better fees and at considerably better conversion rates. To the benefit of everyone really, the office environment, clients, your staff, your you know your own mental health, everything I think it's you know it's more considered. That's contributing isn't it to the rise of the self-employed agent and through the different self-employed models, many of whom we work with and they're great that we tend not to work really with the volume agent simply because they don't have the time to consider it and certainly many of them, not all of them, but many of them are not brave enough to pitch a 1% fee. And they're pressured with, you know, we are talking about this a lot. They're pressured with very simple KPIs. Or very specific KPIs and anything else. Which don't lend themselves to what we bring. So look, we're coming towards the end of this. I did want to touch on one thing and I loved your response to this at the Voice of the agent conference so you've probably already guessed what I'm going to ask you. So you know AI does fabulous things with photos nowadays. Why do agents or vendors or landlords need an in-person service where they can just shove a photo into Gemini and go give it a modern minimalist dress with some mid-century artwork on the walls? As I quoted one of my team had said and as I quoted at the voice of the agent that doing virtual staging or AI staging is like creating the most amazing trailer for a really shit movie. Yeah, I love that. It has its place. Don't get me wrong. It absolutely has its place. Oh look, for new builds to imagine. plan new bills. Yes, exactly. That's what that's what I meant. Once it's completely used to furniture in for off-plan new builds to try and sell off plan it's great for lower end properties perhaps student lets or for lettings in particular where it's lower end then absolutely has its place. So the tenant's still in situ you're trying to avoid having an empty period. Then getting rid of the stuff virtually and putting in that way. We've done it, we've got unfurnished flats where, as we know, the misconception is that unfurnished flats look bigger, but as we know, they are typically perceived smaller because people imagine their furniture bigger and everything else. People can't imagine where the beds go. We've done CGI styling, furnishing, to help people understand the size of a space and what it might look like. We actually did one recently where we did a light refurbishment, an uplift on an apartment, which included us getting rid of all of the very tired furniture in the space. But what we always say to our landlords is that don't rush out and buy stuff. So what we did with that is we worked with loft with their furnishings and every now and then we work with the guys at DCTR, Tom and his fabulous team. they've got a little partnership together where they've got a lot of lost furniture. Yeah, yeah. CGI. So what was great there was we pre-agreed a furnishing package with the landlord if we needed to furnish it. We had DCTR, Tom and his team style the space with the furniture that we pre-select. I mean there was a few items they have but largely. So we could go look and our marketing was here it is unfinished as it looks. Here it is with proposed furniture in it and that was great because again it gave tenants and in rentals I think particularly there is and often for very good reason a natural disgust with tenants of what they see online. A half the time the photos are ten years old and it's not an accurate representation of what the flat looks like but again you know furnishings in rentals I think there's got to be the bane of my life I've lost track of over the years how many times I've had heated debates with landlords about furniture. They'll buy an 850 grand flat and then they'll refuse to spend more than 1500 pound furnishing it. It's like, you mad. They go and get the cheapest, DeVan beds and Argos sofas and all this sort of stuff. And look, again, it comes back to that thing of understand your market. Why would you buy an asset of that value, our advocacy was typically clients should look at around 1% would be ideal budget spend to fully, if you're doing curtains and everything else, it kind of keeps it in keeping. But yeah, it's more often than not a very, very difficult sell on that one. But yeah, I think the CGI thing, like you said, it has its place off plan sales absolutely. Even to a certain extent an open market you have your beautiful show home that teams like you dress but again although you'll understand 80% of the buyer there will be that 20% that will want something different. I think the great thing now is again particularly when you build they've got so much data and drawings and and sister and data around those that they could, you know, you can present that to buyers and go great, put it in Egyptian, you know, make the walls Egyptian cotton and make the bathroom macramarine blue and you know, style it in mid-century furniture, you know, so you can, you can, it can help those unimaginative buyers that we talked about imagine the space quickly and easily transformed into into how they would live for now. But like you said, in terms of you've got to be really careful about you create this online perfect property and then they walk in and literally you Photoshopped everything. It's wallpaper, peeling and you know, it's not a good, it's not, it's not a good way to get a sale. If the first emotion someone has, it's a disappointment, it's a threat, this disappointment. It really isn't. You know, that's not going to lead to a high offer quickly. No, no. Here's what you could have won. Yes, it could have won, but look what it's actually like. Yeah. So I think the real thing, the real, and you know, it doesn't matter how far we go down the AI rabbit hole, you know, the human bit will become increasingly important and creating an emotional connection will become increasingly important, not less important, because more and more it's easier to do more and more with the AI tools. And as we become very desensitized to all of that, then the minute we walk into something that's real and we can look and feel and touch and smell, you go, "Wow, I feel at home here." And that will become really, really critical as we move forwards into this AI world. Well, again, like I said, in letting huge amount in lettings is trust. The reality of the matter is, and this is why we're going through this huge change with the Renters' Rights Act going through now, is tenants have for too long been treated very poorly in the rental market. And there is an infinite, seemingly infinite list of stories of tenants who have either seen something online and rented it based on what they've seen online only to walk in to find Christ's, it's not even the same property they saw online. They've used photos of a flat next door. Or they go to see a property and I said what they see doesn't match what they see online. One of the things I find hilarious, one of the most common comments we get on our viewings is, "Oh my God, it looks exactly like it does online." It's like, "Yeah?" That's what you want. That's the good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Shouldn't be a surprise. But I mean, we definitely talk to people, and people will make comment on that, be like, "Oh, not your experience. No." the furniture's changed since then, the property's, you know, whatever else. And equally, you've got those tenants who come and see stuff and they ask for XYZ to be done or changed or all can we have a more modern sofa and lo and behold, moving day comes around and the works haven't been done or they've been done poorly or that modern sofa is the cheapest one IKEA, is the cheapest one from the IKEA line or you know, whatever it is. and at best they're disappointed and at worst they've been lied to. - Yeah. - And so I think, yeah, in letting trust is such an important thing. And it's something, you know, we've taken a lot of time, like the last few years ago, we implemented a few rules. Like we used to try and stack our tendencies back to back 'cause all landlords talk about voids, voids, voids, voids, can't have voids. And I think our average void was somewhere like three days. - Yeah. But the trouble was we kept having this problem of properties being handed back in a condition we weren't aware of. - Yeah. - Because the tenants had their own furniture until they remove it. You don't know what you're dealing with. - No. - You know, whatever it is. And we just had no time between to solve that. So we were having tenants who were promised XYZ and through no fault of our own, were moving in. And it wasn't. We'd kind of done 80% of what we said, but there were three new things. And our attitude was we would obviously give the tenants a heads up. We'd say, look, tenants have literally just moved out this morning. This is a day or two before the tenants move in. We've discovered XYZ, we've got contractors lined up for Monday, but not what people want. People don't want to start their tenancy. They want to move in and unpack. They don't want to move in and have to leave everything in boxes because you've got contractors coming in five days time. - And I think it's a bit like I talk about in sales, that where we're doing things for the sales market, that these days people want to go and look at a property or move into a property in the case of a rented property, but they want to go and view a property. And as they step across the threshold, they want to stick on their video and they want to be video calling their friends or their family and say, wow, look at this. And what they want is that affirmation from their friends and family that they're doing a great thing, that it's money well spent because it's expensive. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. - Whether you're renting or buying, it's expensive. And people want that affirmation. And if they're going round a really tatty flat with the damp in the corners and the moldy carpet and the kind of thing. - The bike handlebar scrapes down the hallway walls. - Or they're walking into a property that is super cluttered with an owner's belongings, the minute that they walk through the door. That's not giving them that wow. And that's what we, you create in your lettings as you get properties ready, you know, in between tenants. And it's what we're creating individuals for the marketing, but we're creating it in real life as well as so that people can walk in. Well, yeah, we, we, so we mandate five working days between currency transitions now. So we've got time. So you've got time to get it. So if it's small stuff, it's fine. And if it's big stuff, we've hopefully still got time to get it sorted and done. So that because you can't you can't make a second first impression. No, you know, and so tenants will have three impressions with your company that the first the when they contact you initially. And what that interaction is like registering and booking and viewings. What that interaction is like at the viewing what's the person like who they meet. does the property match their expectations or hopefully exceed them etc etc and then you've got that third impression and this one that really matters is the one where they walk in their home for the first time. Yeah and that home is really important you know it's not particularly in lettings. Agents don't talk enough about home. No you're right. The language and disparity towards tenants is still really poor. I mean, we've kind of jumped on the back of paramount properties attitude to language. You know, I will very happily give them credit that I loved their adoption of the monikers of owner and resident as opposed to landlord and tenant. And I still use landlord and tenant in conversations because contextually that's how most people idealise with them. But within our business, we try our utmost to use this language of owners and residents and talking about home. that's exactly what it is. You know, we live in a society now where people are going to rent, more people are going to rent for more of their lives and there's going to be a growing segment of our society that is going to rent for the entirety of their lives. And so we can't keep talking about property and renting and tenants. It has to be about home, you know, and how you feel in that space and how that space makes you feel. And like I that that moment of when you move into your home and the property is exactly as you expected it to be when you walk in that door or better you know and there's that nice maybe there's that nice little surprise there or whatever it is but you know you like I said you don't get to make that first impression again and if that tenant walks in and there's things not been fixed and things that you promised would be done that haven't you know that you're gonna spend months or years winning that trust back and scrambling to get that all done and yeah it's painful. Well listen we have run out of time as is often the case in these situations but I've absolutely loved our chat today. Lovely to come and talk to you. Thank you for having me. And I'm really looking forward to our little project we're doing together next week and sharing some details about that as well so I'm really looking forward to that. So if you have enjoyed our chat today, do please find out more about Lemmline Tears, go on their website. I think I'm right in saying Elaine, you've now got a couple of kind of sprits off, like franchise operations. - So yeah, we've just started to franchise so that we can do what we do and it becomes more economically viable for more people who are remote from where we are in the Midlands. So we can, we touch the whole country, but having people in Kent, Wales and Devon, which the first ones just make what we do more viable. - So if you're an agent or a developer looking to run a more successful sales operation, check out, have a chat with Elaine or her team and dig into the data, take a data-led approach to understand that better. If you've found our conversations interesting today about data, reach out to Unchained. They're kind of, I consider the pantheons kind of the overarching view of data and marketing and analytics. We've talked about 20 EA today as well and yeah lots of fascinating things but reach out to either of us but a data-led approach can't help and yeah let's let's build and create homes that inspire passion right it's that thing if you don't want want, 10 people who are kind of interested. What you really want is three people who absolutely fall in love with the property because that's where the magic happens. That's where everything kind of comes together. Elaine, thank you so much for your time today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yeah. See you guys soon. Bye. Bye.