Premarket Activity & Staging

Questions for Premarket Activity & Staging
Questions contributed by Martha Webb on March 5, 2009

QuestionsForLiving: What are the most important questions that an individual should ask when preparing a home for sale?

Webb:

1) What were the features that I liked when I bought this house?

• How can I make sure that potential buyers see these features?

2) What about living here has made life special for me and my family?

• How did my family live in this house?

• What were our favorite activities – leisure and entertaining?

• What were holidays like in this house? 

• Was there anything we had to adjust to, and how did we accomplish adjustment? 

• How did the kids live in the house? What were their favorite activities? 

• How did I feel coming home from work or school?

• What room did we gravitate to and how did we use it?

• What stories can we tell?

Example: An agent showed a client a house that she did not particularly like at first glance. However, the agent helped her evaluate it by telling her how the owners lived in the house: one of their favorites was having breakfast in an area which allowed them to watch the morning sun and the deer graze in the field beyond the house. The stories helped the client envision this as home rather than just a house. Note: The current home owner knows what it was like to live here and how it feels, the agent needs to remember to ask the seller to describe what it was like and how it feels and then work on sparking that feeling in the buyers.

• What areas can we highlight and how?  

• What do the potential buyers see when they look around the house, and out the windows that will enable them to see themselves living in this home?

Note: Many people think of staging as making the house look neat, like a museum, however the real art of staging is in asking, and then answering, questions such as: How can I help the potential buyer feel what it would be like to live here? How can I make this house feel like home to the potential buyer?" The answer lies in how you lived there – where did you play games, read a favorite book, relax with friends and family? 
It is important to get a clear idea of what you can control and what you cannot control in the process. For instance, you cannot control the buyer's criteria such as location, size, price. You can control the feeling – if it is neat and clean, buyers will feel comfortable; if it is in good repair, buyers will feel that they will not need to spend time and money when they move in.

In today's market the buyer will typically evaluate a home online. Therefore, when a potential buyer visits your house you can be sure that it meets his/her basic criteria. However, many buyers are overwhelmed with choices and may find it easier to cross your house off the list than to look creatively through normal living conditions. Staging will help them evaluate and envision a house as home.

For writing the house / home description for publication ask:

• What is the basic criteria that people will want to know about my house?

• How can I, in the description of the house, provide a hint for what is feels like or what it is like to live here?"