I am a Home Stager that enjoys walk through consultations. My business stages so many vacant properties that having the opportunity to work with sellers and occupied properties keeps my sales and relationship skills honed and it affords me the opportunity to be creative. I recently worked with a family that provided a perfect example of you win some and you lose some. In Home Stager speak, "You can do as little or as much as you want." They won the wallpaper discussion (none was taken down), we won the carpet skirmish (new carpet was put in.) We had several negotiations, but my favorite revolved around a slipcover for the sofa. The house was full of peach and those accent colors that went with it years ago. The sofa was in good shape, but it was patterns and stripes of those dated colors and emphasized the colors in the window treatments, wallpaper, etc. I recommended they put a slipcover over the sofa to tone done the color palette so that the positives of the house could shine thru.
One of the parties felt that slipcovers were tacky and used to hide bad or ugly furniture so we had a lengthy discussion on it. The other party involved was on board and said that slip covers were used frequently in the area they lived in. I left feeling I had a 50/50 chance of success (that gives you a feel of the strong aversion to slipcovers) but was thrilled with new carpet coming in. I had to stop by to get an agreement signed for some rental items and lo and behold a slipcover was on the sofa. It hadn't been steamed and the direction labels were still on it. The party said that they could not figure out the slip cover and thought it was a block due to negative feelings and was waiting for a sibling to come and take care of it. We had recommended adding new pillows and the sellere was very excited about the pillows they had picked out and they were great. Even the photographer mentioned how great it looked when taking photos for the Realtor.
Today I got a call that there was an offer on the condo in less than 2 weeks and the client is now telling people that they need to call me.
We don't always win and in the end the seller can choose to do only some of our recommendations, but in this case I'm so very happy that we won the slip cover challenge. It made all the difference when buyers walked in the front door. Of course the new carpet and editing we did throughout the property helped as well.
See the slipcover and pillows below.
Comments(0)