Nine of the Worst Staging Decisions Ever Made

Trulia recently released a great article of nine of the worst staging decisions ever made. Selling a home can be difficult and staging can make or break a sale. Here at Elder Group Real Estate, we provide complimentary advice and staging to our listing clients  – with professional advice and a full spectrum inventory of mountain home furnishings as part of our service portfolio.  Want to see our work? Check out this link on ElderGroupTahoeRealEstate.com

Here is a highlighted list of the Trulia article, published November 29th 2012

1. Bizarre collection overload. Let’s face facts: it is very difficult for almost any collection to look orderly and neutral, two high-level aims of home staging. Unless you have attractive, high-end built-in cases for your collections and target buyers are share your affinity for the objects, even your cool clock collection or the dolls your grandmother gave you can come off as a pile of space-consuming clutter.

But when it comes to shockingly bad staging decisions, the choice to give your taxidermy collection or your gun collection a starring role in your home’s staging ranks up there in the top few. These collections are highly likely to trigger (pardon the pun) ethical and sanitation concerns in the minds of many home buyers, and are completely distracting from the strengths and features your home has to offer.

2. Echo chamber staging. In an echo chamber, sounds are amplified because they simply bounce around in that closed space. The same can happen with your thoughts and ideas about staging, if you don’t open yourself up to outside input. And unfortunately, it seems to be the bad staging ideas that get amplified, more than the good ones.

For instance, no matter how great your taste is, if your home is heavily customized around your personal preferences, it can be very difficult for buyers-to-be to envision themselves, their families and their belongings in the place. Echo chamber staging happens when the sum total of your staging team is you, yourself and you – so that the only conversations that take place about your home’s staging plan are those that take place in the echo chamber of your mind.

3. Failure to edit. You’ve heard thirty-somethings who still live at home diagnosed with failure to launch? Well, failure to edit is a close cousin of this syndrome. As the New York Times recently put it, “the job of stagers is to reverse the accumulated creep of hundreds of small and misguided design decisions, and to erase any hints of the messiness of daily life.” You might have a fantastic rug, a beautiful sofa, amazing tchotchkes and the highest-end personal effects are high style. But chances are good that their cumulative first impression to a buyer viewing your home will still fall short of the “one broad stroke of gorgeousness” the Times piece correctly says home sellers should aim for, with their staging.

The failure to edit is a generalized syndrome which can manifest in all sorts of specific staging woes, from garden variety clutter to disastrous decor style mashups.

4. Silly scenarios. The difference between staging and interior design is simple: staging is cost-and-time efficient design undertaken with the specific objective of showing a home off to its best advantage, playing up its features and helping prospective buyers visualize the best lives they could possibly live in the home, should they choose it. Unfortunately, this has led some well-intentioned sellers and stagers to believe they should stage one bedroom as a Parisian boulevard (Eiffel tower mural included), another with a full-blown butterfly theme and the third as the beach – complete with umbrella, towels on the wall and sunscreen bottles on the nightstand. I saw this house, folks. With my own two eyes.

5. The ‘lived-in’ look. When your home is being shown for sale, it must be immaculate, every single time it’s being shown. It should actually look like no one lives there: no toothbrushes, curling irons, protein shake mixes or paperwork allowed. No bowls of cereal on the counter – actually, nothing on the top of a counter or a table that is not intended to be a design element.

Is this difficult to keep up? Absolutely, especially if you have children or animals living in the home while it’s being shown. But you’d be surprised at how bad an impression just a few personal toiletries or dishes can make, distracting prospective buyers and making them wonder why you didn’t care enough to pick up before you let them in.

6. Paraphernalia gone wild. Similar to collections, any sort of paraphernalia that is allowed to take over a space has the potential to create an instant turnoff for buyers-to-be viewing your home.

This can include:
• work-at-home electronics, supplies, cords and paper clutter
• pet supplies like litter boxes, cages and food
• children’s toys and sporting goods
• cooking and crafting supplies
• books, magazines, notebooks, piles of mail and writing implements.

7. Closet cramming. If you have years worth of personal belongings of multiple family members that need to be out of sight, but not discarded, it can be very tempting to cram everything in a closet, shove the door shut and call it good. Problem is, home buyers today are desperate for storage space, so will undoubtedly open those same, crammed-tight doors in an effort to evaluate how your home ranks for storage.

Beautifully organized closets with ample room create an impression in the buyer’s mind that they, too, can have an orderly life in your home, a life where there is a place for everything – and everything has a place. And even huge closets, if crammed to the gills, make buyers wonder how they’ll ever get by with so little closet space. (Closet cramming also makes some buyers wonder what else you might be hiding, whether or not that concern is justified.)

8. Failing to stage for all the senses. A house that smells like pet mayhem or smoke or has a noisily defective heater is a tough house to sell, no matter how beautifully it is staged. Unfortunately, smells and sounds are very easy to get acclimated to, when you live with them. Buyers, though, will detect them the second they walk in – and the moment they do is the moment we in the business call “turn-off time.”

9. Not to. Ultimately, the most shockingly bad of all staging decisions is the surprisingly frequent decision not to bother staging your home at all. This explains homes like the one I once viewed which had residents still sound asleep in their beds, in the dining room, as the listing agent walked myself and my mortified buyer clients through the property. On the less bizarre end of the non-staged spectrum, this is how lovely homes with vast potential – and vast, overstuffed 80’s couches and 60’s decor – end up selling at a discount, as cosmetic fixers at a discount. This is a particular tragedy in cases where the owners could have painted, spruced, moved loads of things out and a few newer things in and made much, much more money on their homes.

Thinking of listing your home? Give Alison Elder a call and see why Elder Group Tahoe is one of the TOP leaders in Tahoe-Truckee Real Estate market – we LOVE our business! Proudly affiliated with Chase International, contact Alison Elder at info@eldergrouptahoe.com or call 530.582.8103. Be sure to visit our site for Truckee-Tahoe properties for sale at www.ElderGroupTahoeRealEstate.com.