Home Staging and The Psychology Behind Its Effectiveness

Selling homes is more of an art than a science, and if it were a science, then the science would be psychology and not statistics. In other words, you only need one capable buyer to fall in love with your house. This buyer doesn't care about the economy or the real estate market; they only care about finding a home that makes them feel good and avoiding mistakes.

The process for making a home emotionally appealing is intuitive but not always obvious, i.e., deep down we know what makes a home appealing, but we must be careful not to allow pop culture to guide us. An emotionally appealing home is one where we feel relaxed and comfortable, not one where the décor is gaudy and distracting .

Furthermore, if we're overly impressed with a home's décor, then the showing is akin a friend's housewarming party, but we're impressed but detached emotionally from the home. We should be able to picture ourselves living in the house. Anything that takes away from our mental image of the house being ours also takes away from the chances of the house actually becoming ours.

Avoiding mistakes is the other side of the psychological coin. When buyers enter a home, their subconscious desperately searches for information to help them develop a feel for the house. They perform a “thin slice”, a term popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. In other words, their subconscious gathers a great deal of superficial information in a very short amount of time; this information then manifests as feeling about the house.

The most common negative feeling is that the house is poorly maintained. The buyers make this judgment by noticing dirtiness, clutter, and small defects. Of course, this inference is completely unfair because no one lives in a perfectly clean house, and even if they did, it wouldn't mean that they also took care of bigger issues in the home. Nevertheless, it happens all the time, and once the buyer gets this feeling, there's no reversing it. So, we must put on a show in which we always maintain an immaculate house and there are never any repairs to be done. You might say that we need to set the “stage”.