Back When it Was “Staging-Light”

Back When it Was “Staging-Light”

Today’s Question: How did we ever manage to sell homes back in the old days when staging wasn’t a “thing” like it is now? Especially when so few Sellers or Agents were inclined to put much effort into painting, primping or preparing new listings before they hit the market?  

Did those hundreds of places I sold back in the 90s just get up and sell themselves? By today’s standards, they were a motley assortment of fixer-uppers and former rentals. A slew of 60s ranch homes that hadn’t been updated and had about as much charm as a bag of hammers. And lots of old Victorians and aging 1920s craftsmen whose better days were buried deep beneath thirty-seven layers of paint.

Back then Sellers and Agents subscribed to a “staging-light” approach (as in ultra-light).  We did the basics and not much more. The goal was to spend as little time and definitely as little money as possible.  

Most Sellers were ok with doing some modest decluttering and fine with paying a housecleaner and a carpet cleaner to come in and clean. Every once in a while they could also be convinced to hire a handyman/painter to blot out all memory of a particularly hideous wall color.  

In general, Sellers were less resistant to the notion of establishing “Curb Appeal” back then. Most grokked that curious buyers would be caravaning by their homes as soon as they went on the MLS. And they understood that if that first wave of drive-by buyers didn’t like what they saw on the outside, they certainly weren’t going to care about getting inside to see the rest.  

Like Sellers then and now, they had less resistance to tweaking things on the outside of their houses than they did about rearranging things on the inside. (Inside changes feel like judgements and criticisms about personal choices.)

Think back to those wonderful scenes in the 1999 movie American Beauty where Annette Benning is scrambling around in her slip, frantically trying to get ready for the big open house. She’s using a tooth-brush to clean the thick brown grout between the 70s tile. And she’s using cheesy-looking  tiki-torches around the backyard pool to create a  lush “Tahitian atmosphere” at an otherwise awful middle class home. That was more or less what constituted staging back in the day.

Today, all of the above seems rather quaint and almost inconceivable at a time when prices are higher than ever and the medium of the internet controls public perception about what homes should look like. Staging isn’t seen as a choice anymore, it’s more of a necessity if a Seller wants to get a top dollar return on their investment.

More Next Week…