During the year the Board and Management team signed off on our investment in our new home staging business, Crave, which launched in quarter 2, 22/23 as a pilot in the Perth Real Estate Market.
We have identified the home-staging space as an emerging but substantial, under-serviced market segment with significant organic growth potential across Australia. In the last ten years the Australian home staging market has more than doubled and is becoming an increasingly meaningful part of the substantial Australian residential housing market, which had a value of approximately $10.2 trillion, with approximately 11 million residential dwellings in Australia at March 20221.
At Crave we will leverage our understanding of the needs of homeowners to style and prepare a home for sale in a way that appeals to buyers. This will help sellers maximise their home’s value at the time of sale. Crave will provide a sophisticated offering to the home staging space by utilising our supply chain access, marketing expertise, logistics and industry relationships to deliver a seamless service to home sellers and Real Estate Agents.
Crave has a modest capital requirement and has been funded by part of the proceeds from the sale of our Osborne Park premises earlier in the financial year, thereby ring-fencing the allocated capital to the opportunity and managing the downside risk.
Further allocation of capital from the sale proceeds will be dependent on the success of the pilot program and cashflow from existing operations will not be diverted to the new opportunity.
It is an achievement by all involved to take Crave from concept to reality in less than 12 months. We have taken a measured approach that has included extensive market and consumer research, comprehensive business planning and the development of a detailed brand and marketing strategy.
Crave is a natural fit to our portfolio and we anticipate it will be the first step in the development of a new brand with strong growth potential and longer-term opportunity for Joyce to expand into close, adjacent and natural opportunities.
Dan Madden CEO, Joyce Corporation
Source Reference: 1 https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/total-value-dwellings/latest-release