Burlingame home staging, San Mateo home staging, San Francisco home staging

I was researching online on trulia.com yesterday. (I do this sometimes to see what are some of the staging trends on the market and what my competitions are doing.) And I was shocked by some of the photos that I have seen online.Trulia is a HUGE website now and it’s well known among sellers & buyers. So it’s so important to have great photos on the site. Not to mention the competition is fierce among realtors and sellers right now. Wouldn’t it make sense to put your best foot forward and attract potential clients through your listing presentations? Here are some deadly mistakes that I have observed:

1. No photos! NO PHOTOS?! In the age of internet shopping where we can even buy houses & cars on ebay, internet shopping is soooo easy. Just point, click, check out and viola! Santa Claus dressed in UPS men suit comes knocking on your door and deliver the goods to you. Not to mention in a 2005 National Association of Realtors study, 79% of buyers now shop on internet first, and that number is rapidly growing. Internet has changed the buying patterns and has shifted the way real state professionals work. Buyers no longer need to depend on Realtors to get the latest housing news. They can do so proactively online on sites like trulia.com. How can your Realtor be so lazy that didn’t even bother to put a picture up online where 79% of buyers first visit the internet? You ARE paying for his/hers services, correct? Shouldn’t he/she put some effort into the presentation to attract as many buyers as possible?!
2. Bad Picture. Having a picture even if is bad doesn’t mean it is better that no photos. Internet buyers are very used to scanning and skimming pages to get to what they want, since there are usually at least 25 items on each page. If your pictures are not attractive, it is easy to be overlooked. Here are some of the examples of bad pictures:

1. The picture itself is crooked, which can be easily corrected by programs like photoshop. It is human nature to seek for horizontal & vertical lines. (See Craig’s blog: Someone needs to tell the truth: PHOTO LIES!) Don’t know how to use it, well, it is time to learn! You want to make money on your equity, you need to do something about it. In this competitive market, sitting on the couch waiting for offers to come in is no longer the case. It’s not a seller’s market anymore. So be proactive!
2. The photo is blurry. People are going to spend a big chunk of their savings and probably going into debts for this purchase. How would you expect them to come to your open house based on a blurry photo while your competitions have perfectly clear photos to lure them into their open houses?
3. The photo is too dark. No one wants to live in a cave except vampires and cavemen. Bright and airy sells. That is the human nature. We want new things or things look like new. No one wants to buy a drab and old and dark house (unless they are flippers then it’s older the better).
4. The image is too cluttered! Every photo tells a story, correct? Well what does a cluttered photo tells?A. The Realtor is too lazy or Seller is too cheap to hire a stager or didn’t even bother to clean before the photographs are taken.B. Speaking of dirty, this house doesn’t look well-maintained.

   C. Where is the focal point of this room? What is going on here? All I see is a mess. I don’t want to live in a messy house, I want to live in a clean house.

   Once the buyers have done judging your house based on your cluttered photo in split second, they will skip over and move on to the next clean feeling photo because they can mentally move into that home without imagining removing clutter first. Plus, everyone wants to live in a model home. Have you seen a cluttered one? First impression counts, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book “Blink.”

The point is: let the internet be your friend. Let it help you to get those buyers into the door! Like staging is an investment to sell the home quicker for top dollars, cleaning up your photos is a small investment as well. When I first started, I really ignored that. I was like “I have enough to do. I will just plop that photo on the web.” But it does make a LOT of difference. We are in a VISUAL industry. Our clients see what we do in plain sight. So it’s very crucial to have a great presentation, especially when the competition is fierce! Just that 5 minutes may make a whole lot of difference in making inquiries on that listing. So pay attention, please!

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