Finding the Balance in Occupied Homes

Transcription:

 All right. Hi! I hope everyone is doing well today. It's a gorgeous day outside. I feel like it's finally summer. So I thought why not videotape outside? Today's topic that I wanted to focus on is how to help your clients find balance in their occupied homes. This is the main topic that I always cover with anyone I'm working with, especially when they're living in their home. 

When I go in as a home stager, I am trying to get their home sold for the most amount of money. I have staging recommendations that are going to make their house look the best so we can accomplish those goals. It's tough on home sellers because, you know, they're emotionally connected to their home. They have made choices and design choices, decor choices, personal taste, choices that makes them want to want to keep their home the way it is.

This is what my job is. To not only give the right recommendations but really help them buy into how I'm going to help them. One way I do that is I explain how we're trying to find this balance. There are two things that we're trying to find balance in when we're staging occupied homes. One is openness and one is homey-ness. From an openness perspective, what we're trying to do depersonalize the home. I think all of you already address this with your clients and have them take down all those personalized photos, all the family pictures, all the baby pictures. The goal with that is that when a home buyer walks into view the home that they're not feeling like they're visiting someone else's home, but they're starting to see the home as potentially theirs. It's hard to do when all you see is all of their photographs. Depersonalization is a big one. 

Another element of creating openness in a home is trying to steer the sellers away from a very specific style. I can think of one home that I was working in that did a lot of traveling to Mexico, they loved to fish and had a tropical theme. The home had really neat decor pieces all over their house they'd collected over many trips. The problem with a lot of decor like that, a buyer comes in and all they see is the decor. They really get caught up in what the house decorations look like, and they don't see the actual house. One of my goals is to neutralize some of those elements. So that might be reducing decor. Maybe we only need one fish on the shelf.  We still want it decor in there, but we don't want fish everywhere.

Another thing might be neutralizing is color palettes. One of the easiest ways we do that and we recommend, is through paint. Probably the most common paint recommendation is the dining room. A lot of times, that's where I think everyone has a little bit of fun. It's a smaller room. We can put our personalities in it. I was just in a home today, actually, that was bright, coral pink. I love the color. It could make a phenomenal dining room, but for buyers that might not be really into pink. It's not their thing. That could be a big turnoff for them. And they can't see beyond the paint color. So if we can make strategic choices with our paint we create more openness for more buyers to visualize living in that house. The more they visualize living there. They're more likely to put in the offer. And that is our goal.

The other element of openness is decluttering. When the photographer comes in to photograph your your listing, you’ll discover that things that can look great in person don’t translate well in that photograph, it just kind of looks muddled. A lot of little things look  busy. You can't really see what it is. In person I'm like, “Ooh, that's a really cool collection,” but you don’t see that in the pictures. 

Another thing that's like that is a lot of plants. Now I use a ton of plants, faux plant, in my staging, and you'll always see them in my vacant stages. For those real plant lovers that just have a whole collection, the corner, it can get dark and it doesn't translate well in a photograph. We might just say, “okay, what plants can we keep? Can we spread them out in different parts of the house? Or eliminate some, at least with your listing photographs. 

The goal here is to give the buyer a sense of space when they walk in. That is a big part of finding balance. We need to create openness. Now on the other side of the spectrum is we also need homey-ness. If the occupied home has no artwork on the wall, no pillows, or just a couch in a room, it doesn't feel homey and cozy. It's going to be hard for a buyer to emotionally connect to that house. We want to inspire a little bit of the lifestyle that they're going to have there. If it feels dark and bare, they're going to have a hard time doing that. 

Things that we're looking for to create that home homeyness is, art on the wall and pillows on that couch. We want the buyer to come in and say, “This is where my family is going to hang out and play games.” It's cozy, it's inviting. Or, “This is where I'm going to snuggle up on a cold day and watch a movie. Or that bathroom with some white towels and few plants to creates a spa-like experience. They start envisioning relaxation there, or a nice soak in the tub? The master retreat area, does it feel relaxing and inviting? And this is where fresh bedding can come in and really make an impact on how your buyer views your home or your listing.

So those are the two ends of the spectrum. What usually happens when I go into a house is that I always like to introduce this concept of finding this balance. The reason is because we want to sell your home for the most money, in the fastest amount of time possible. Normally everyone ends up on one end or the  other of this spectrum. We might walk into a house that is so homey and so cozy and has a lot of personality. So we're going to work on creating more openness. Other houses we walk in have nothing in there. Therefore we recommend bringing in some elements to really help the buyer emotionally engaged with the property. That is the balance we're always working towards.

This is something that's really important to help the homeowner understand, so that when I do make recommendations and say, “We need to take down this beautiful piece of art.” They understand that it's not just my personal taste. I like to be the good guy too. Some stagers get a bad rap and play the bad cop coming in saying, “You gotta take all this out.” Actually the art's a good example. I had one house that had phenomenal art. I mean, just exquisite art, but they, and there were art collectors and it was amazing, it was everywhere. We had to minimize it. We had to take most of it down. In a hallway with six pieces of art. We took 5 down, and just put one up. Doing that made a huge impact because when the buyers walked in, they were noticing the house, they weren't caught up talking about the art. 

 We don’t want buyers talking about whatever amazing collection you have or your neat plaques with all of those clever sayings. They can get really caught up with that. We don't want that to happen. We want the buyers to come in, notice your house, notice the unique selling features that your house offers them, and envision living there. Our goal is that buyers feel like it's the house that they can move into and feel like it's theirs instantly. That's what we're really striving for. We help sellers understand that our staging recommendations are meant to come up with a good balance to sell that house.