Before and After staging, Don't show homes vacant.
Like most stagers I try to browse the listings on mls.ca periodically. It’s part of knowing what’s selling and what’s not in the local market. This time I made a game out of it. I randomly hit 14 homes and saw what I could ‘spy’ that could have been improved by a stager.
First of all, the photo presentations were a bit weak in most cases. There were 2 with no exterior shots and 1 with only 5 pictures. The one with the most, 23, was actually the home that needed the most upgrading of all. Even though the system will take 30 photos now and surveys say over 21 is best, most had only between 13 and 20. There was one high end home where pictures featured dead grass and no leaves on the trees – yet it’s now July 30th. One agent had half the pictures in the vertical orientation which is wasted opportunity.
The next prevalent problem was showing homes vacant, or with vacant rooms. There were 6 vacant properties out of the 14. Vacant rooms don’t tell much of a story in pictures, other than what the flaws are.
And there were lots of flaws. 5 homes had window coverings that were not photogenic, dowdy or even down-right, old-fashioned ugly! How hard would it be to rip those down? Lightening and brightening a home is, after all, the improvement with the highest return on investment.
Five lacked curb appeal having no colour at the door, either in the landscaping or the paint colours. A blank canvas for the new owner perhaps? That is, if they ever attract one to actually come inside the door.
But they were colourful on the inside in some cases. 3 had flaming red, orange or burgundy walls. (Oh, by the way — one of those had seafoam chairs to go with it.) Another 3 had wallpaper or borders. I was somewhat surprised that only one of my little sample had fake wood wall paneling. One had real pine with yellow varnish, but I remember that home from an open house and the reason it hasn’t sold since Spring is the terrible cigarette smoke smell.
Surprisingly only 2 homes had cluttered rooms. One vacant home had the dish soap and a sponge left on the counter. “Tsk, tsk, for shame!” A few scatter mats were spotted, and one industrial mat was seen in an otherwise attractive foyer.
When it comes to furniture placement, of the 5 where I could actually see any furniture, one had made a barricade of leather love seats. This was keeping viewers out of the family room. Most of the others had just pushed everything back all around the walls.
There were two sets of old brown kitchen cabinets with dated hardware. One of those rooms had a suspended ceiling and a dated fixture to go with it.
5 homes were having problems with artwork. It was either too high or too small or the wrong shape or non-existent. In one case the occupant had tried to make a grouping with 3 pictures that were as different from each other as pictures could possibly be. They were also floating way too high and couldn’t begin to balance the massive furniture piece beneath them.
Flooring ranged from beautiful hardwoods to questionable vinyl, but I didn’t keep track because it’s hard to tell the cleanliness and condition in these photos.
Only one home looked like it might have had some professional staging help. It looks like I have a little more work in this area to get the word out about the benefits of home staging. If you are thinking of selling why not use some of my findings as a list of common mistakes that you won’t make. Or better still, call your local Canadian Staging Professional for a consultation.
Author, Martha Stanton-Smith, owner of Rearrangements, is a Certified Canadian Staging Professional who helps serious home sellers in Kingston, Ontario get full worth for their homes. She completed her staging training in 2006. Visit her profile here:
