Sell the house a room a year instead of once a decade

A full interior decoration on a three-bed is £3,260. Exterior painting, £2,380. A kitchen refresh, £915. Wallpaper hanging, £445. A single room, £410.

Decorating does come round again. Most interiors want redoing every five to seven years, exteriors rather more often depending on exposure. That is a genuine cycle and it is the basis of the five-year prompt that belongs in every decorator’s system.

But five to seven years is a very long time to hold a relationship with nothing happening in between, and a lot can go wrong in it. People move. They find somebody else for a small job and stay with them. Your number changes. Their phone changes. By the time the cycle comes round, a good share of the connection has evaporated.

There is a better structure available, and it comes from the way people actually decorate.

Very few households do the whole house at once. They do it room by room as money and patience allow — the living room this year, the hallway next, the main bedroom the year after. Each of those is a separate decision, taken at a separate moment, and every one of them is a job somebody gets.

If it is you every time, a household worth £3,260 once every six years becomes a household worth several hundred pounds a year, every year, for a decade.

A full interior is £3,260. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One interior job covers five and a half years.

On the room-by-room structure: three hundred past customers, a tenth of them doing one room a year at £410, is £12,300 annually from households already on your books — against a five-yearly cycle that would produce a fraction of that from the same base. The work exists either way; the question is who gets it.

• A colour record left on every job and held on every customer
• A room plan agreed at the end of most jobs
• Two seasonal prompts a year rather than none
• Work arriving from households you decorated eighteen months ago
• A rising share of turnover from past customers rather than new enquiries

Weeks 1–4. The colour and finish record built and put into use immediately, since it starts working on the next job.

Weeks 5–8. Room plans captured at completion, and the seasonal prompt written for whichever season is next.

Weeks 9–12. Five-year and twelve-month prompts set live off historic job dates, which for an established decorator produces work straight away.

At ninety days the measure is how many past customers have been contacted at all. For most decorators the honest answer beforehand is none.

Most domestic households sit on a five-to-seven year cycle with a room-by-room rhythm inside it. A smaller group has genuinely predictable, repeating decorating requirements, and those are the ones worth putting on an actual schedule.

Landlords and letting agents. Void turnarounds happen whenever a tenancy ends, which in a portfolio is continuously. That is not a cycle to be prompted, it is a standing arrangement to be held.

HMO and communal areas. Licensed properties and managed blocks have inspected condition requirements and a redecoration cycle measured in years, budgeted in advance.

Pubs, shops, salons and small offices. High-traffic commercial interiors need doing far more often than a home — frequently every two or three years — and the work happens out of hours to a deadline.

Rental holiday properties, which take heavy wear in a short season and are refreshed annually.

Exterior on exposed properties. Coastal and high-exposure locations run on a much shorter cycle than the general four-to-six years, and those households know it.

Each of those is a customer where the next job has a predictable date rather than a vague window, and where an annual conversation about next year’s programme is expected rather than intrusive.

A decorator with six of those relationships has a floor under the year that no amount of domestic prompting produces — and they are won by asking about the cycle rather than waiting for the call.