The Allure of the Fruit Bowl: Home Staging ‘Twiddles’ With a Buyer’s Mind
Looking to buy a house? Beware the allure of home staging. The marketing technique, in which a home’s interior and exterior is carefully prepped, sometimes by a paid professional — can trip-up unsuspecting or naïve house hunters, says Curtis Seltzer, a land consultant from Blue Grass, Va.
Staging techniques like “non-casually tossed toss pillows, items arranged in threes, cleared-off counter tops, furniture angles that draw you into a room, a bowl of limes and lemons and other focal points” fiddle with buyers’ minds by making them respond to a look that “home-style magazines and television shows teach us to aspire to,” he writes.
Home buyers impressed by such good looks, tend to overpay. According to home stagers, staged homes sell for 3% to 10% more than non-staged homes. Mr. Seltzer advises reading up on staging techniques to recognize them when you see them. And when touring homes — “imagine the house buck naked and completely empty,” he suggests. “Thats what youre buying.”
Or, tell your real-estate agent not to show you any staged properties — if you decide you want to buy a staged home, you’d “be competing against stage-struck buyers who have fallen under the stagers spell” and may end up paying more, he says. –Lauren Baier Kim
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