How to Get Inside your Buyer's Head

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. 

Get your instant home staging price now by clicking here.

Let's Talk About Color

Neutral Living Room

There are a lot of major principles of design. They can include scale, composition, pattern, rhythm, repetition, contrast, white space, texture, balance, color and many more. Like many of you, I spend a lot of time looking at real estate listings. But I don’t look at them dreaming about what my life would be like if I lived in the house listed. Instead I am looking for mistakes, or wins in every room in terms of design and home staging. Did the stager do it well, or did they miss the mark? What could they have done better that would have made the room look more appealing to a buyer. Today we are going to talk about one of the most important design principles we use on a daily basis in our home staging in both Portland and Seattle, and that is color. 

First off, let's define what color is and even more importantly, what it is not. Colors are found in the rainbow like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Neutrals are not found in the rainbow like black, gray, brown, tan, cream and white. Gold is to color like the letter “y” is to vowels, you know AEIOU and sometimes “Y”. Gold can be considered both a neutral and a color.  These two different categories of colors vs. neutrals it is very important to separate.

Navy Blue Bedroom

We use color for home staging in a very precise and calculated way. We generally stage public areas like living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens with almost all neutrals. The bedrooms and offices, however, are staged with color. Each one having their own single bold color to identify it differently from the next. 

The tradition of labeling rooms based on their color came from the Victorian era.  They would say things like, “William and Anna will be staying in the blue room while Gilbert and Besse will be staying in the red room.” We continue this tradition by providing our buyers with a subliminal labeling system using colors. We will stage a room in completely neutral furniture and then add a layer of color with pillows, linen, art and accessories of  just one color. As an example we will make the primary bedroom a blue room, the queen bedroom in pink, the twins in green, the full in orange… you get the picture. 

Peach Bedroom

When a couple tours homes they might see upward of 7 houses in a day, with each house having 10 rooms. That is 70 rooms in one day. The average person can hold 5 bits of information in their head at one time. When the modern day phone number was being developed it was discovered that by breaking down a 10 digit number into three groups of three-three-four digits, it could be more easily remembered. We use this knowledge to our advantage by giving each room a distinct color label for the couple to discuss our staged rooms more than the other listings they saw that day. 

Take, for instance, theoretical home buyers Jill and Andy. They have been looking at houses all day long. Jill says to Andy “Remember the house that had the wood floors and the white walls, and quartz countertops?” 

Dusty Rose Bedroom

Andy replies, “The one with a garage?” 

Jill says, “No, the other one.” 

Andy thinks for a moment and can’t recall which house Jill is thinking of, but goes along with the rest of the conversation. Then Jill says “Remember the one with the pink twin bedroom?”

Andy says, “Yes I remember that one.” Feeling a bit proud that he was paying attention. 

“I think my office should be in the blue bedroom.” Jill thinks out loud. 

Andy considers for a moment that perhaps he might like the blue bedroom, but decides against starting an argument over it and simply nods his head ‘yes’ to validate Jill’s musings. 

Mint Green Bedroom

In the parable above Jill and Andy could be any couple looking for real estate in Portland or Seattle. They struggled to discuss the house that was not properly staged, but had an easy go at mentally moving into a house staged by Spade and Archer, using our Victorian color blocking theory. The big lesson here is to remember that it does not matter if you, as the seller, like a color or don’t like a color, the matter is moot. What it really comes down to is will your buyer be able to easily recall and discuss your house with their partner? If so, then color has been used correctly to stage your property.  What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite neutral?

Get your instant home staging price now by clicking here.

Why Go Instant?

Our motto is pretty simple. “Exceptional Home Staging, Made Easy.” But it has not always been that way.

Spade and Archer has been staging homes since 2009. For those of you counting, that’s 13 years. For the first ten years, we used a fairly traditional system to price our projects. A client would call us or click on our “schedule a site visit” button and have one of our staff come out to meet with them on site to review the project. The team would then head back to the shop and put together a custom price based on that project. The entire pricing process took around a week or two and required the seller or seller’s agent to put in a least an hour of meeting time plus any travel time.

We started hearing complaints that we were difficult to work with. That was the last thing we wanted. “The pricing process took too long. There was too much correspondence. Our emails were too detailed.” To figure out where the largest breakdowns in our staging process were we started tracking each and every phone call. We found that 90% of the phone calls received asked the same question: “How much?” or some variation on that theme. We heard the term “ball park” a lot.

We needed to find a way to get a price in our clients hands quickly. This was how we developed the instant pricing tool. It took months of research, digging through historical data, finding first one, then two, then three, then ten different types of software to make it work. Once it did work, we had to convince our customers to trust it.

We launched the Monday after the COVID lockdown started. We had planned to call it “Instant Pricing” for months, but when COVID hit the biggest thing on everybody’s mind was not touching anything that somebody else had touched before. At that time we all thought COVID spread through touching surfaces. Over the weekend prior to the launch of instant pricing 1.0 we changed the name to “Touchless Pricing” and emphasized the fact that it was still safe to work with Spade and Archer, even if nothing else in the world was.

Very slowly, as we started to go through lockdown and learned more and more about COVID, we continued to emphasize how “safe” our new pricing tool was while at the same time also mentioning how fast it was. By the time the world started to normalize again, instant pricing had become a comfortable, reliable way to price home staging projects.

Every once in a great while we get a new customer who wants us to see their property prior to us giving a price for home staging and we gently explain that we would be more than glad to come out and take a look after they see our price and decide they would like to move forward. They almost always agree that the old system is more familiar, but the new system make more sense. In the end our clients in Seattle and Portland always find Spade and Archer provides “Exceptional Home Staging, Made Easy.” What more could you ask from a home stager?

COVID was hard, but it changed the entire way Spade and Archer operates for the better. How did COVID effect your business? Did you keep the changes or did you go back? Comment below.

Get your instant home staging price now by clicking here.

Meet Bella, A Millennial and our Communications Specialist

Let's talk millennials and home buying. With millennials currently being the largest buying demographic out there how has communication changed? My name is Bella, I am Spade and Archer’s Client Service Specialist, and I am a millennial. I am also a second time home buyer who bought a home in this ridiculously competitive market.

Bella Rubio is the voice on the other end of the line when you call Spade and Archer.

Millennials have grown up in an era of technology that has streamlined many things in our day to day lives and changed the way we communicate. While we grew up with Gen X teaching us to be respectful, educated and thoughtful in our interactions we have taken these values and made them our own.

We know how to present ourselves in a formal and polite manner. We have had to do so while we compete to get into the best colleges and land our next dream job. We have inherited the ability to present ourselves in a matter that older generations deem ’socially acceptable’. And while we have the ability to communicate this way, when needed, it isn’t always our preferred method of communication. We have big dreams and little time and we know it. We have a fire lit to be the best and do the most. And sometimes formalities get in the way of that. We enjoy being casual and straight to the point. We don’t need the fluff in every conversation, rather the take away.

The experience of buying an out of state home was nothing short of a miracle. The excessive amount of Facetime calls, DocuSigns and online interactions were nearly overwhelming. As a millennial, I understood the processes and I appreciated the promptness they provided. My real estate agent is a Gen X and while she had her strengths the way we communicated was evidently different. She gave a longer message that could have been a couple sentences or the occasional call that could have been a quick text. While I trusted her (and am eternally grateful for her) we each approached an interaction in a different way.

Communication can be tricky regardless of generation. There’s what I say. What I think I said. What you heard. What you say. What you think you said. And what I heard. Now while all millennials aren’t the same, we can agree the way we communicate is different from other generations. Weather we have social media, iPhones or the internet to thank for this we are here for it. So, pull up a chair and listen up as millennials buy homes and raise families. How will communication from one generation to the next continue to transform?

________________________________

To hear more about how Millennials communicate listen to our episode of Behind the Yard Sign with special guest Jacob Donahue.

Get your instant home staging price now by clicking here.