IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS

 
What the sellers didn't know, and what their REALTOR® hadn't wanted to say to them, was that adding a lot of small accessories was hurting, not helping the look of their home.

IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS…

Recently I staged a typical family home in Asheville. The sellers had done their best to get the home ready to go on the market and make it more appealing, and in the process they had bought more than a dozen small decorative pieces that they had placed on the mantle, coffee table and side tables in their living room. What the sellers didn't know, and what their REALTOR® hadn't wanted to say to them, was that adding a lot of small accessories was hurting, not helping the look of their home.

There were several problems with these small pieces:
1.    They created a busy look and took a prospective buyer's attention from where it belonged - on the house itself. 
2.    The pieces were too small for the room and for the surfaces where they were placed.
3.    Their style didn't suit the other furnishings in the room.

The new accessories looked like they didn't belong. Had the family bought the accessories because they liked them and wanted to live with them, it would have been a very different matter. Unfortunately they had bought them in a misguided attempt to decorate their home to appeal to a prospective buyer.

There are two lessons from this story:
1.    When you're selling, simplicity serves you better than decoration, especially decoration in the form of small accessories.
2.    Had their agent brought in a professional stager early in the selling process, there would have been an objective third party to have the conversation about how to prepare their home for sale at the lowest cost. The result would have been a much better product to sell and the agent-client relationship wouldn't have been tested by the need to be candid. The sellers probably wouldn't have had to buy anything, or at most one or two larger scale pieces.

If you're planning to sell, remember that the way you live in your home and the way it needs to look when you're selling it are very different. Protect the equity in your home with help from a professional stager. It's a small investment with a large return.