As many of you know I started this blog with an idea that a house can be fixed well as an alternative to buying new. After gutting a house down to the studs and rebuilding it inside and out it sat on the market with a ridiculously low asking price. I was told it needed to be painted and staged. It was white walls with beige carpet. Yuk was the term, but did I mention the low price? Back in the day you wanted people to use their imagination for how the place could look. Today we have stagers.
One of the first with the staging business was a Real Estate marketeer of extraordinary talent. She changed the face of how we promoted ourselves as professionals. Staging was a natural off shoot of making a home look professional.
After spending the last couple of years as a disciple who had seen the light it’s starting to wear on me that people look at furniture more than seeing a house. A house should be the focal point for a buyer. Buyers should be looking at all the flaws and how they will be living. Once you move in your stuff it looks different than the stuff that no one ever sits on.
I’ll also mention scale. Did you know you have condo and house scaled furniture? How about when a stager brings in the smaller dining room set to make the room look bigger? How about that well placed chair that shows a use for a corner but you would never want to sit there? The best is the blow up bed that is just a bit smaller than normal. When you add in pictures or pottery, things of luxury, in a utilitarian house or put a screen in a questionable corner of a room is that showing a buyer the home or an image?
People may make any conclusions they want from what they see, but in my business we see the house after the staging is gone and the reality sets in. Room dividers are the most deceiving thing to compensate for. Screening can be up and make sense in staging but practical day to day living has those screens in the way and put into a corner.
I’ll never say a stager or agent would deliberately cover a defect with staging. There may be times when the eye is diverted from a draw back, other times the illusion may be a distraction from space use challenges. The purpose of staging is to give the buyer some sense of how to live in a property.
What I have been thinking the past few years is that a house should be able to stand on it’s own merits. A buyer should be able to see the house and the agent should be able to draw the conclusions of what the house has to offer. It bothers me when agents open the door and let the furniture be the conversation. People actually talk about how nicely a place is staged, or refer to a house as the house with the red couch. It’s a sales technique.
People very rarely refer to the systems of a house, or the foundation. More attention is given to the roof rather than what’s underneath it. People talk about counter tops rather than the cabinets. Many houses have cheap fall apart cabinets with granite on top.
The paint part I understand now. People don’t want to do anything other than move into the house. I think money spent on a high quality paint job is money better spent than cheap paint and staging. Actually a lot can be done by concentrating on making the house livable rather than presentable.
