Hi, guys! Naomi Findlay here. Today, I’m going to talk to you about how to avoid over-staging your property. That’s right. There’s such a thing as over-staging your property. An over-staged property can have a really negative impact on the final outcome of the sale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eZnTFY-IBY
https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/nf-blog-audio/4-overstaged-properties.mp3
I think a really important place to start with this is talking about exactly what preparing your property well for sale is. We talk about it in a few of our videos about a really well staged home, a really well-prepared home and a really well-presented home.
It draws people to the highlights of the property and diminishes some of the low-lights.
Never covers them up, but diminishes some of the low-lights of the property. I think the best way for us to tackle what an over-staged property is is by describing it as something that does the opposite of just that. If a well-staged property is a property that all the highlights of the property are emphasized; placement is perfect, styling is perfect to the target market, make sure that we’re highlighting all of the wonderful assets of the property. Then what would an over-staged property do? An over-staged property really draws back from that.
An over-staged property distracts.
That is a dirty word when it comes to a well-prepared property or home staging. A well-prepared and well-staged home distracts the buyer in no way. There are no distractions from the highlights that the property offers.
Exactly what is an over-staged home?
I’m absolutely certain you’ve all seen it. I’m absolutely certain that you guys have seen champagne bottles on the edges of baths, rose petals in baths, six to nine piece dinner settings, reading glasses opened on an inspirational quote on the side of the bed, a pot of coffee on the end of the bed and a percolator freshly brewed when no one’s there. I’m sure I can hear a lot of you guys probably going, “What does it matter? Why? Why bother?” Ten years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. Ten years ago, people would have just seen the luxury and the nice styling that this brought to a property. However, our buyers are so much more intelligent now. The market has changed and there’s an expectation. One of the things that comes with that expectation is being respectful to the buyer and treating them as the intelligent people that they are. How does over staging a property not do that? Have you ever left a property where you may have viewed the property at 9:00 in the morning? You get there and not only is the breakfast bar fully set, but also the dining table is fully set for a nine-piece setting for a four-course meal. Instead of you being drawn to the highlights of that property, instead of you being immediately drawn to the amazing indoor/outdoor area and pool in the back of the property, instead of that, you were distracted by the fact that you’re like,
“Wow. It’s not dinnertime. Hold on. I thought we were viewing this property at 9:00. I wonder why they’ve got the table set.”
Then, I think this walks the fine line between a well-staged home and an over-staged home. A well-staged home distracts nobody from the highlights of the property, whereas an over-staged home constantly distracts from the highlights of the property. Another great way to look at it would be if you have viewed 10 properties in any one day.
There is a high possibility that the over-staged home would be one that you would talk about.
It would be, instead of recounting the pool and the amazing indoor/outdoor area out back, the thing that you might recount about that property is the half-drunk red wine bottle with the red wine glasses by the spa in the back area. Our buyers nowadays are intelligent enough to understand that they can have a glass of wine in the spa. We don’t need to show them how to use the spa.
However, if it’s a highlight of the property, we need to take them there.
What the red wine on the side of the spa did is distract them from what they might do on the property. One of the things that you really need to do when you’re thinking about staging your home is make sure that you don’t walk across that line, that you don’t do things in your property that distract the potential buyer from what they need to be doing. When you stage or when you prepare a property for sale, which we all know is an essential, essential key to selling a house for more. One of the things that you can do when you overstage it is put a little bit too much of what you think the house needs to be used for and how you think the house needs to be used.
A well-presented and prepared property will be a bit of a blank canvas.
It will show a potential buyer the lifestyle that this property affords them, it will allow them to emotionally connect. To emotionally connect to a property, we can’t be distracted. To emotionally connect to a property, they need to be our emotions. We need someone to give us a canvas and start to paint a picture in a well-presented property, but we need to let the buyer colour that picture in.
Overstaging a property doesn’t let the buyer colour that picture in.
Overstaging a property distracts a buyer and doesn’t allow them to emotionally connect to the life they want to have in the property. Let’s talk about a few of the sometimes fun and sometimes funny ways that I’ve seen properties over-staged. I truly hope I offend no one out here with these comments because it is quite a tenuous subject; a subject that I’m quite passionate about but also a subject that can offend. Upfront, I apologise if you may have over-staged a property with some of these things in past. I hope you take my comments as they are, which are purely meant to help you increase the amount of money that you sell your house for. Let’s talk about some of those things I’ve seen. I mentioned a few of them earlier, but they’re absolutely worthy of being mentioned again.
- Rose petals in a bath
- Candlelight lit only the bathroom
- Spa bath on in the bath
- Bubbles in the bath with a built-in pane of glass next to it
- Over-set dining space that literally looks like you’re about to have a Christmas or a Thanksgiving dinner.
- Half-empty red wine bottle and some red wine in it
- Freshly brewed coffee on the end of the bed with fresh croissants, regardless of what time they open (that’s a little bit of a faux pas)
Some of these things can really walk that fine line. One thing you need to do to make sure that you don’t overstage a property is when you’re thinking about setting up a vignette or setting up a prop or presenting the house for sale, you need to ask yourself,
“Would I do this on an everyday basis? If I lived in a perfectly presented home, would I have the red wine by the spa? Would I have the coffee or would 90% of the population have it?”
That’s probably a good guide. If you look at 10 of your friends and you say, “Would nine of them be like this? Would nine of them present their home like this on a weekly or a daily basis?”
If the answer is no, absolutely don’t do it.
You run the risk of over-staging your home. When you overstage a home, remember, all you do is distract. Overstaging distracts our buyers from what they really need to be looking at. What they need to be looking at is the highlights and the assets that this property offers, the lifestyle that this property can give the buyer. I hope this has helped. I hope it has helped show you some of the over-staged things that can happen in a property and a little bit of what not to do. I hope you enjoyed today. There is a link below to a few of the funny bloopers that I’ve seen in over-staged properties. Please click on that, download it, and maybe you can use it as your What Not To Do list. We’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening.
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