Virtual home staging in the West End

The West End is Glasgow's tenement at its grandest. Hyndland is the textbook: red sandstone, four storeys, tiled closes, a bow or bay window on the front room and ceilings well over three metres, on streets like Falkland Street, Queensborough Gardens and Novar Drive. Dowanhill and the terraces off Great Western Road are blonde sandstone and a generation older, with the villas of Victoria Crescent and Crown Circus long since split into duplexes and garden flats, and Park Circus above Kelvingrove keeps whole townhouses and grand conversions. Hillhead and Partick fill in with smaller flats: one and two bedrooms, an internal box room with no window, a kitchen where the bed recess used to be. Along the Clyde, Glasgow Harbour adds new-build blocks with balconies. The photographic problem is the same in almost all of them: one big front room that takes all the light and two or three rooms behind it that get much less. The bay reads as a separate cave when it holds a desk and a drying rack, the hall is a long dark corridor, and the box room photographs as a cupboard. Digital decluttering clears the furniture the light has to get past; staging then sizes a sofa and a dining table so the bay reads as part of the room, gives the box room a job as a study or a nursery, and leaves the cornice, the tiled fireplace and the stained glass in the close exactly as shot.

West End flats sell on Scotland's offers-over system, and the West End is where it runs hottest. The seller's Home Report is attached to the Rightmove listing, with a surveyor's valuation and condition ratings, so buyers arrive at a viewing knowing what the building is worth and what is wrong with it. The flat is marketed at offers over a figure below that, a closing date is set, and sealed bids come in. In Hyndland and Dowanhill the winning bid has often landed 10 to 20 per cent above the Home Report value, and a good two-bed can go from listing to closing date in a fortnight. The buyers are academics and medics from the university and Gartnavel, lawyers and finance staff who cycle into the city centre, families chasing the Hyndland school catchment, and a steady stream moving up from London or across from Edinburgh who shortlist on Rightmove and Zoopla before they get on the train. Supply is thinning: the Additional Dwelling Supplement and Scotland's rent controls have pushed landlords to sell, so many listings arrive straight out of a tenancy, photographed with a tenant's furniture or with nothing at all. The Home Report already answers condition and value. What the photographs still have to prove is that the rooms work, and that decides how many notes of interest an agent holds by the time a closing date is called.