I tip-toe dangerously close to home staging in today’s Arizona Republic column (here’s the permanent link):
Make rooms make sense when selling your home
You walk into the home and you know you’re walking into a living room. Except there is a pingpong table standing there in the middle of the room. There’s a dartboard on one wall. On the opposite wall is a dry bar with a beer tap.
You walk into what you know is a formal dining room, except there’s a grand piano sitting in the middle of the floor with the dining room chandelier hanging down below the sounding board.
Past the kitchen is a charming solarium, except it’s overstuffed with the dining room table and china cabinet.
The garage should be just beyond the laundry room, but all you can see is a vast warehouse stacked with junk.
By the time you get to a room you know is a bedroom, despite its giving every appearance of being an office, you’re ready to give up. The house might have promise, but you can’t see it. The sellers have unwittingly plotted to confuse you at every turn.
My best advice for sellers is this: Move out. Leave behind a few pieces of excellent furniture – even if you have to rent it – and a few tasteful decorator items. Get everything else out. Yourselves, the kids, the pets and their odors, and all that accumulated clutter.
Your response: “But we can’t afford to move until we sell!”
Fine. Then get rid of everything you can. Yard sale. St. Vincent de Paul. The dump. And finally, a rental warehouse.
“But that costs money, too!”
Sure does. But think of it this way: If your house spends an extra three months on the market waiting for the buyer who can see through all the clutter, you will spend perhaps $5,000 in mortgage payments and opportunity costs. Worse, you may have to drop the list price by $5,000, $10,000 or more. Simple arithmetic argues that storing your stuff off-site is a lot cheaper than challenging potential buyers with the puzzle you have made of your home.
If you want your home to sell, and sell quickly, make the rooms make sense.
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Dave Barnes says:
Greg,
What about the bread baking in the oven?
,dave
P.S. As someone who had to sell the house of the deceased father-in-law, I believe in staging. We decluttered and then set the dining room table for a formal meal. It was easy to get him to “move out”.
August 25, 2006 — 7:15 am
Greg Swann says:
Indeed. Or dip the light bulbs in vanilla extract. Makes every room smell like sugar cookies.
August 25, 2006 — 7:31 am
ardell dellaloggia says:
In our area when dealing with “Generation X” buyers, I have seen several “mistakes” worth noting.
1) Older people staging with their older stuff. Looks like Grandma’s house. Time to pack up that wooden rack in the kitchen with the collector set of silver “tea” spoons and those Norman Rockwell plates. One such house ended up being owned by a single, 43 year old guy! Go figure.
2) Staging over dirt. Filthy house with cute little acompaniments like cookbooks and wine glasses. Clean those shelves before you stage them.
3) Over staged. Music on to distract you from busy road noise in a vacant house. Come on guys. How odd does it feel to walk into an obviously vacant house and hear music playing. One had big band music blaring to drown out the heavy traffic noise. Wondered if it played 24/7 and when the neighbors were going to break in in the middle of the night and smash the CD player.
4) Tag sale/house for sale You walk in and all of the furniture has a price tag on it. All of a sudden people start acting like they are in a store or at a garage sale, and they forget that maybe, just maybe, they might have been thinking about buying the home if they weren’t so distracted by the “stuff for sale”.
5) Hiring a stager who has their own “stuff” and insists on bringing the same “stuff” to every house whether it fits or not. If I see another wicker set in a living room…
August 26, 2006 — 10:35 am