Creating Reasonable Expectations for Buyers

Staging is a marketing tool, it’s about dressing up and styling the home to make it a welcoming space for buyers to move in mentally. It also transforms a home into a sell-able product — a listing, a tool to gain more equity out of your biggest investment of your life. But staging is often disguised as a tool of hiding undesirable traits of a home, sometimes legal information that should be disclosed by the agents & sellers. Staging is not conditioning. It cannot make your leaky roof go away and it certainly cannot conceals any fundamental flaws the home has.I had a seller asked me once: “Can staging hide the fact that my floor is unleveled?”

Frankly, no, no amount of staging can fix an unleveled floor. And that’s something your buyers should know before they sign on the dotted line. Or, how would you like they come back with the claim that you purposely concealed that fact that your floor is uneven and backed out the deal, or worse, slap you and your realtor and your stager a lawsuit?!

We, as real estate professionals, should also create reasonable expectations for buyers, meaning that we don’t over-fixing the photos to make the listings look like a multi-million dollar listings then when buyers actually work through the door, they feel that they have walked into a shack. Or under-representing the homes through photos that don’t do the home justice.

The first scenario doesn’t happen very often, but the second one comes up very often.

These are some of the photos for a $15,000,000 property in California (yes, that many 0s!):

mmm. looks a little spooky to me to live in. does “ghost” come with the house? or that’s an added feature?

And what is this shadow looming at the bottom of the photo?

Woo, how about this one? A Polaroid photo! Perfect to market my $9,880,000 listing!

Whether we are selling multi-million dollar homes or starter homes, we need to create reasonable buyer expectations when we market the home, i.e. creating a space they can envision themselves living there. Now more than ever, our internet presence is more crucial when it comes to internet shopping for buyers. It will add to our sellers’ bottom line and ours. We only have one-shot at creating first impressions. So make it a good one.

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