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.
