When it come to preparing a property for market it is vital to remember that the house is no longer your home, rather it is a product being placed on the market with a potential buying demographic. You have now become a small business owner and you must design your product to appeal to the largest buying demographic possible.
So often we work with sellers who say things like “I love modern furniture and I hate the color orange so be sure to stage the house the way I like it.”
We do our best to listen and then gently explain that “Of all the people in the world who might buy this house, you are not one of them.” As home stagers in either Portland Oregon or Seattle Washington, we are designing not for the seller, but for the buyer. Based on the location, size and style of the home we can roughly determine who the buyer might be and design the home to attracted the largest buying demographic possible. If we are instead designing the house for a person who no longer wants to live there we will, most certainly, miss the mark.
As humans, we have two thinking processes, logical and emotional. When we search on the internet for the type of house we are looking for, we use the logical side of our brain. “It must have 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a back yard, in my price range and in a location where I want to live.” Once we find a house we think might interest us, we type the address into our phone and drive there. That is when the logical side of our brain turns off and emotional side takes over.
The emotional side of our brain is very fast at making decisions. It says things like “Lion, run!” Where as the logical side of our brain is much slower but also better informed, it says things like, that lion is taxidermy and can’t hurt us. As you can see, both sides are useful, but we must understand how these two sides work together in order to understand how a buyer views a house.
The logical side of our brain can hold up to 5 bits of information at any given time, it’s why our phone numbers are set up with three digits - three digits - four digits, it helps us remember them more easily. The emotional side of the brain, however, can only hold one piece of information at a time. When a buyer is viewing your property, you want them to think about themselves living in that property the entire time they are there. Anything else that might grab their emotional attention might take away from the single task at hand. It could be something religious, or political or even a simple vice that suddenly grabs their emotional attention away from the house and at that point, you have lost them.
I once had a client tell me a story about a giant bear skin rug that filled the primary bedroom of a house. She went on and on about how much the potential buyers had made a fuss over it, discussing it multiple times throughout the day while they were on tour. I asked a simple question “What did you think of the house?”
Her answer was “I don’t recall, none of us were paying attention at the time.” She had heard me talk about this kind of thing during site visits before and said, “It really was true, we really reacted to that bear skin rug.” Even more importantly they failed to react emotionally to the house at all. Needless to say, they did not buy the house nor the rug.
A religious effect could be anything from a crucifix to a Buddha, to a mezuzah. It does not matter what religion the potential buyer is or is not, if it draws their emotional attention, the object is doing you, the seller a disservice.
A political effect is anything that puts us into categories of us vs. them. It could be a sports poster or banner, a MAGA hat, a book by Hillary Clinton, a national flag, American or otherwise. I know for a fact that these things can all be very emotional because I have had people get very angry with me when I asked them to put them away for showings at their house. The very fact that it pushed them to anger was proof enough that these types of items should not be displayed IF our number one goal is to sell the property.
Emotional vices are pretty easy to define these days. They fall into some very simple categories, drugs, sex, alcohol, nudity, tobacco and guns are all thing that have no place being displayed in a property being marketed for sale. While their presence may draw the attention away from a house, their absence never will.
We also never stage with anything that has fur. Because we live in the Pacific Northwest, we have a high concentration of vegans and vegetarians, along with animal rights activists. When it comes down to it, items with fur, especially taxidermy can be very emotionally evocative even for folks who do eat meat. Nobody will ever walk into a house and say, “No faux fur or cow skin rug? I hate this place!” But they could walk in and see the skin of a murdered bovine and say to them selves, “This place just isn’t for me.”
We are headed into a transitioning market, one that will be tougher for sellers to get houses sold. Choosing the right team to help you prepare your property for market will make a huge difference, choose wisely.