Virtual home staging on the Southside

The Southside is the other half of Glasgow's tenement story, built a decade or two after the West End and mostly in red Locharbriggs sandstone. Shawlands, Battlefield and Langside are street after street of it: two and three bedroom flats with a bay window, a press in the hall and a kitchen that was once the scullery, around Queen's Park and along Kilmarnock Road. Crosshill and Govanhill are blonde and denser. Strathbungo is the exception, a conservation area around Alexander "Greek" Thomson's Moray Place and the Regent Park Square terraces, narrow houses that are deep, dark in the middle and prized all the same. Pollokshields, across the railway, is a Victorian garden suburb of sandstone villas around Maxwell Park, many divided into large flats with a single ceiling rose in each. Mount Florida and Cathcart add main door flats; Newlands, Merrylee and Muirend run to interwar semis and bungalows that sell to families on their way to the East Renfrewshire schools. The photographs fail in familiar ways. A Shawlands front room is shot with the sofa jammed in the bay and no dining table anywhere; a Pollokshields villa room is so tall that a normal sofa looks like dolls' furniture; a bungalow lounge is buried under a decade of family life. Digital decluttering removes what is in the way, then staging puts back furniture with the proportion each room asks for, and the cornice, the fireplace and the stained-glass hall window stay exactly as photographed.

The Southside is where Glasgow buyers go when the West End is £50,000 out of reach, and for the last decade that has been most of them. Shawlands has been named among the best places to live in Scotland, Strathbungo and Pollokshields trade at a premium the rest of the south cannot touch, and a two-bed red sandstone flat near Queen's Park listed at offers over will usually have a closing date within a fortnight. The mechanism is the same as everywhere in Scotland: the Home Report sits on the Rightmove listing, buyers read the valuation and condition before they view, and sealed bids come in on the day. The buyers are first-timers and couples who rented in the West End, families trading a Shawlands flat for a Newlands bungalow or a Giffnock semi, and a growing number of professionals posted to the Queen Elizabeth hospital or the city-centre firms who shortlist a district they have never walked. Ex-rental stock is a growing share here too, especially in Govanhill and Battlefield, as landlords sell up under the higher Additional Dwelling Supplement and rent controls. With so many near-identical flats listed at once, the photographs are the whole shortlist. The listing that shows the bay furnished and the third bedroom with a purpose collects the notes of interest; the one with the tenant's furniture, or an empty room, gets a lower bid or none.