DIY Versus Professional Staging \n

SPEAKER_01 0:10

If you're looking to sell your house and you're wondering whether you should use a professional staging or you could do it yourself because you know we're in New Zealand and do it yourself might as a big culture. Listen up. This is the episode for you where we're gonna cover the pros and cons for both of those situations. Hello, Megan.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hello.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Megan Love from Harcourts is gonna give us some tips.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I'm wearing my Harcourts top.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Right, Megan. So why should people use professional staging versus them doing it themselves? Or should they do it themselves?

When Empty Homes Need Furniture \n

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Well, we don't actually mind. I mean, George and I, we are adaptable, so people ask us all the time do I need to get rid of all my furniture, put it in storage, and get some professional staging in. It it depends. It's always a depend. Um we we ask people a lot of questions and figure out what would work for them. But yeah, we always give options. If the house is empty, then we're more leaning towards yes, it would probably be good to put some furniture in. Yeah. Reason being we need to show the size of the rooms. If it's just been renovated, a lot of people paint their walls very neutral colours. Yeah. And every room is painted in the same colour, which works really well for buyers walking through. But it's hard to go, oh, that's the blue bedroom, and that's the yellow bedroom, and that's the green bedroom. Yeah. Like if they all are the same colour, it helps to have a bed in there to show how big the room is and maybe a different coloured duvet for each room.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

I guess the problem here for a lot of um sellers would be the cost.

Cost And Timing Trade-Offs \n

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, staging costs thousands of dollars, depending on the size of your house. If you have a little house, that's fine. But if you have like we've we've just listed a four-bedroom, three lounge, and a study property. So we're of course with that house, we said, hey, look, there's furniture in here already. A three-seater couch is roughly the same, whether it's modern or a little dated. So we we find a lot of people have really lovely furniture already in the house. And if anything, they could take a little bit of furniture out of the house. So, yeah, so that's we we all the other thing to consider is staging takes well, it's usually in place four to six weeks, sometimes six to eight weeks, depending on what package you buy from the stages, and then they take all the furniture away. So if it's a house that might take a little longer typically to sell, you'd end up with an empty house anyway. So if you've got furniture that you can use until it's sold, that's quite good. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Older style furniture isn't bad either. You know, it's just it's it's often very comfortable, you know, well loved. You can see a little bit of the person's personality. Sometimes we have buyers walking around going, oh, I know that rug and I know that picture, you know, the classic cowhorn picture that's on every wall when a house has been staged. It's always exciting when you get some new staging items in and you're like, Oh, I haven't seen them before. So yeah. So the stages, we've got a few different staging companies that we use and they all do an amazing job. Okay. But yeah, if the person has really nice furniture already, we can certainly work with that. We might just move the couch position to allow more light to flow through.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

I was about to say that that sometimes when you actually just move the furniture around, yeah, that makes a difference in itself. Yeah. Or even taking away items and putting it in the garage. I remember when we were selling this house, we had to declutter quite considerably, and we just loaded our garage with everything. Yes. But it made the house look amazing and pristine. And it was much nicer to keep it clean as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Yeah, it's so much easier for open homes, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yeah. So yeah, so I just had a thought there while you were talking. It's gone. Oh, AI staging is also a thing.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

That was gonna be my next question because a lot of the ads I see these days now they have AI staging.

Easy Wins With Light And Linen \n

Plants That Make Photos Breathe \n

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Yes, it's not something we do a lot, but it is possible to do AI staging. Cost less? Potentially. It depends on the photographer or who you've got working on it. To be honest, most of the time we just take the photos of the house and either put some stuff in there or move things around or get the stages in. But yeah, AI is a is a thing that's becoming more and more prominent? Prominent, yeah. Okay. Mainstream. But a lot of the time, yeah, just positioning, like we've got a property on the market at the moment, and what they'd done was they'd put a three-seater couch facing a ranch slider out to a deck. Now that would be awesome for sitting in and looking out at the view. But from a real estate perspective, for photos, it blocked a lot of the light. So we just moved the couch over to the wall and moved the armchairs into the position where the couch was, and then the light flooded through the gap between the two armchairs and allowed a lot more light into the property. So there's little tweaks that an agent can recommend. And the other thing is towels. Like it's so silly, but fold them nicely, fold them nicely. Our photographer is really particular with her folding. So I just put the towels in the bathroom now and I'm like, I just leave it to her because she will always fuss with them a little bit to make them extra good. I don't know what she does, it's like magic, but she's like this towel folder. Yeah. And I always bring two white towels in because even in our house, you you look at through your linen cupboard. Suddenly, when you have to do photos, you're like, oh my gosh, my towels, we've got children, and you know, every towel is slightly different colour. Like when you look at it, like, have you washed this one more? Was this your favorite, you know? So just uh in our little box of tricks, we've got two white towels and white pillowcases as well. Because you know, when you stack your pillows, yeah, it's nice to have a white pillow at the back and then your colourful pillow at the front, or sometimes we mix it up and put the colour one at the back and the white one in the front with a cushion. So, yeah, so there's little things that we can do to kind of make that all flow for you.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

I also like the idea of plants and photos because again, that give that brings life. Otherwise, if you don't have the plants, I find everything's just bland.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

So, what can people do in that sense if they don't have any plants at home?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Well, Kmart has a couple of fake plants. I'm not really that keen on fake plants, but I also have my you've probably seen it on social media, I have the most photographed plant in Carpenter. It sits on my fireplace during the summer and it's a peace lily, and it sulks when I don't water it. So we're always joking about this temperamental plant, but I tend to turn up with it and I put it in a bathroom or a kitchen or whatever. And some shots, if you'll notice looking through the whole house, it's moved. So sometimes it's in the kitchen and the bathroom and a bedroom. So but just a bit of green, it just makes the photos kind of breathe a bit. Yeah. So you'll be amazed what a peace lily can achieve.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

A very peaceful photo shoot.

Four Staging Options Plus Airbeds \n

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yes.

unknown 7:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Next.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Oh, that's that's pretty much all I've got. So options are there's three options professional staging, uh home staging with your existing furniture or AI. Oh, there's a fourth, just photographing it empty is also valid. We can do that too. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Yeah one of the things we used to do when we used to do the staging ourselves for the flip properties. We the trick I discovered and I didn't know about it, but the earbeds. So you buy the ear matrices and you pump them up, and then you put them on boxes because those boxes would would have contained staging. So you get all the empty boxes and then you put the earbed on top of it, and then you put the bed sheets and stuff. But it's really important for people to know that because sometimes people come to the open home and sit down, and you're like, whoa, whoa, don't sit on that. Yeah, looks fantastic in photos and a very cheap option. So that would be my tip to them as well. And as you say, you know, that bullhorn, I think that's a picture from Warehouse. Yeah, and uh the rugs usually from Warehouse at Kmart. And um, to be honest, Kmart has really good linen as well, and really good home decors.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

We have one at the moment that the vendors out of town, and he just got a box of duvets delivered. And for the photo shoot, I ran in with my own duvets and put them in the duvet covers, took the photo, and then we've just laid the duvet over the bed, just because it's an older style bed and it looks fine. Looks fine, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

So it really depends on people's budgets and also how much hassle do you want to go through it yourself, because staging is not for everyone. That would be my thing if people were constraining to do staging themselves. And again, this is based just on my own experience of staging properties, where you might think it looks cool, but it may not be to someone else's taste. So you've got to keep things quite neutral sometimes, but also represent the house. So if you say if it's an older house, you can't just put everything minimalistic and brand new and it looks out of touch. Yeah. Sometimes actually the older furniture goes well as the older house.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah, but then at the same time, if you've got older furniture in a new house, then it also looks out of place. So I guess getting that professional advice from someone like you guys comes in handy.

Using AI To Plan Changes

SPEAKER_00 9:33

And it's usually less is more. Like we don't need a stack of things on the bench. What we're trying to do is create a sense of space. So my number one tip, if you're unsure if your house is ready for a photo shoot, is go around and take photos of your house and then look at your photos rather than the room and say, does this showcase the amount of space I've got, or does it showcase a really cool coffee table book? Because yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

The other thing I found as well with AI, just jumping into that one for a second, is you can actually take photos, upload to AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever you want to use, and you could say, Hey, I'm looking to sell my house. What would you recommend I do with this room? And actually, Chat GPT can give you ideas as well. And I've played even with this room, I played by taking photos and going, How do you think I should do XYZ? And it gave me ideas, so that's why we ended up here. I just need to sort out the background. But but yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing at things it can do for you.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Yeah, we had that happen with one of our buyers. I think she was actually, she came through you, and she came into a kitchen, didn't like it, and during the open home, they took photos and went through AI and looked at different kitchen layouts and decided what they could do and really liked it. And we were sitting there going, Oh my gosh, show us this stuff. Yeah. So it looked really cool.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yeah. So I think people really are in the lucky age that we're living in that you know, it g it AI can do a lot of guesswork for us if we know how to use it correctly. Yes. So um I would I would recommend using that as well, and it's free. It doesn't cost them anything. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Megan, and I look forward to seeing you again. Excellent. Thank you.