🏠 The secret to getting more buyers on the hook ✨

"One of the easiest ways to know you have a buyer on the hook is when they're imagining living here. When you get these kinds of emotions involved, that tells me… you gotta go in." — Ryan Serhant, owner of Serhant Realty, Manhattan, NY

Have you been with buyers when they are LOVING a house? When they are already imagining themselves living there? Do you do the same thing as Ryan? The emotions are where it's at!

Did you know that in Manhattan — and most places around the country — they unequivocally STAGE EVERY LISTING? Because they know it makes SUCH A DIFFERENCE in the emotional connection that buyers will make! And it's SO worth the investment.

If they are occupied homes when selling, they have a stager go to the house to get it ready for photos. Because buyers don't want to see how the sellers live in the house — they want to feel inspired by seeing how THEY could live there.

Ryan also referred to the furniture and staging: "It's like the seasoning, you know? Like if you make a great meal… the seasoning at the end could either really make it or could ruin it." And why could it "make it or ruin it"? Because of the positive or negative feelings and emotions each room elicits in buyers.

As a stager, I want buyers to fall in love with every room. As my friend and mentor Susan at Atwell Staged Home in Westchester, New York says, "The aim is to craft a balanced and cohesive feel so that potential buyers flow from room to room with ease" — and I'd add: making emotional connections as they flow.

The buyer needs to have an emotional attachment to really want it and make the offer. Think about the emotions you have next time you "love" something — that coat, a song, that old car you and your dad fixed up. THAT is how you want prospective buyers to enter your sellers' houses feeling.

Staging a house sets the "emotional stage" for buyers to have an experience that creates positive emotions while walking through a house. A house and rooms that just "feel good" to be in are worth the extra effort, time, and money it takes to create them.

In every house and every room I stage, whether vacant or occupied, I not only highlight the features of each room using design principles — but I also include small but tasteful emotional connection points to further ramp up the positive connections for buyers. A stack of dishes on a table. A book and blanket on a chair.

Little bears on a bed in a second bedroom. Coffee mugs by a sugar bowl in the kitchen. It's that powerful.

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