- Pet smells and cheap furniture are major turn-offs for buyers, says Barfoot & Thompson’s Paul Neshausen.
- Neshausen uses professional stagers to enhance homes, with vendors paying between $8000 and $25,000.
- Home stager Janine King emphasises the art of staging, favouring warm naturals and minimal statement pieces.
A top Auckland real estate agent said that pet smells and cheap furniture are some of the most off-putting things buyers encounter during open homes.
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Barfoot & Thompson agent Paul Neshausen, who sells at the upper end of the market in Auckland’s eastern bay suburbs, told OneRoof that he has had some delicate conversations with vendors about the state of their properties.
“Most people can’t recognise the scent of their own pet. It’s a tough conversation,” he said.
“But even worse are the people who get their friends to help stage their multimillion-dollar home, and it looks like an Otago student flat: cheap furniture, bright yellow or purple all mixed together. There is no sense of style.”
Neshausen, who collects art himself, is particularly pained when he sees on the walls of soon-to-be listed homes super-bright canvases painted by artists no one's ever heard of. “It does the house no favours.”
Barfoot & Thompson Paul Neshausen: “I’ve had would-be buyers ask to buy the furniture – even when they didn’t buy the apartment!” Photo / Fiona Goodall
Neshausen hates fake flowers and randomly placed vases. Photo / Getty Images
The agent currently works with two home staging companies to bring out the best in his listings, but he wasn’t always getting the results he wanted.
Bad accessorising is his particular bug-bear: he hates fillers, like fake flowers, pots of wooden tools on a kitchen bench (“fine if it’s a period home with a cast iron stove”) and randomly placed vases.
“No, no, no. It’s cheap and tacky. I’ll take down the fillers and the pot plants and put things in cupboards.”
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What he does like are good, branded products. His stagers work with Gow Langsford to bring in works by top artists for the walls, and sculptures for the garden. Works by Max Gimblett and Paul Dibble are his favourites – and are recognised by his high-end buyers. “They could easily be worth $200,000.”
Branded candles for the living room (they are lit, not just for show), high-end bathroom toiletries and towels, and smart Louis Vuitton boxes in the wardrobe are musts. “Buyers expect furniture from Studio Italia, Matisse, ECC. It can be cool and funky, but not distracting,” he said, adding that a particular curved sofa from Studio Italia was his stagers’ go-to because they make a small room, or an odd-shaped space, make sense.
“Functional, tasteful. And if there’s an odd room, or niche nobody knows what to do with, we make it into something – an office or something. So no imagination required for the buyer. It’s very scientific.”
One of Neshausen's favourite stagings: an apartment in Auckland's St Heliers. Photo / Supplied
Neshausen said he brought in stagers for about 75% of his properties, with vendors paying between $8000 and $25,000 for the expertise and items.
“I sometimes get surprised by what a difference it makes. I’ll go back to a listing when it’s done and go, ‘Wow, maybe I’ll get a bit more money for this place’.
He added: “I’ve had would-be buyers ask to buy the furniture – even when they didn’t buy the apartment!”
Home stager Janine King, of Janine King Design, has recently returned from an American home staging conference where she picked up an award for her staging of a luxury, modern property on Cliff Road on Auckland’s North Shore (currently on the market for $8.995m).
King won an award for her staging of 76 Cliff Road, in Auckland's Torbay. The property is currently for sale for $8.995m. Photo / Supplied
The trophy home at Torbay, with its 25m map pool, was designed by Fearon Hay. Photo / Supplied
She’s also had house buyers ask to buy her furniture. “These buyers don’t have the time to furnish the property, they just want turnkey,” she told OneRoof.
She said vendors often don’t realise that there’s an art to staging a home. “Some think it is as easy as throwing a few cushions on the couch.”
Ironically, cushions are one of her secret weapons – and one of her obsessions. She confessed to fluffing and rearranging other people’s cushions – in shops or at friends’ houses – and revealed her technique for “zhushing” them just right: “Grab them by the ‘ears’ and shake, then a karate chop.”
You can’t have too many cushions either. “I think I counted 27 cushions for one job,” she said. “The owners loved them and bought them all – and you’re looking at $150 to $250 each.”
King also confessed to poking inside the wardrobes when she is scoping a home – all in the name of research. “I look at their clothes and the colours, and the style around them. You can see what they’re comfortable with and gravitate towards.
“I like to stick to warm naturals, not cold greys. Terracotta shades, lovely sage greens.”
Old leather sofas are one of King's pet peeves. Photo / Getty Images
King believes less is more when it comes to statement pieces. More than one large artwork, sculpture or mirror can often overwhelm a potential buyer, so she has owners cull their art before the house is photographed and listed.
Other no-nos for King include “puny” coffee tables; old brown leather couches; Lazyboy chairs; fish sculptures hanging on the wall (“they look like they come from a $2 store”) and multicoloured flowers plunked in a vase (she only uses white lilies or a big branch of greenery).
Like most stagers, King favours the big white sofas and luxury finishes popular for high-end real estate. She is busting to try some of the trends she saw in America: sage green velvet chairs and sofas; custom upholstered headboards for the principal bedroom; and custom artworks commissioned for the property.
She said the upper end of the market in the US operated at a whole new level. Stagers in New York charge at least $40,000 a job and might do just one property a month, allowing themselves up to two weeks to dress a home (in New Zealand, it is more like a day or half day).
Like Neshausen, King said the biggest mistake vendors made was thinking they don’t need to hire a professional.
“People think they can just do it themselves,” she said. “They need to understand their house is a product. It’s not their home once they put it on the market.”
She still gets a kick out of banishing clients from the house on staging day, so they can come home once she’s finished and get the “wow” moment of reveal, although that has backfired on occasion. “I have had vendors go, ‘This is how we wanted our house to be when we first bought it’, and they change their minds about selling.”
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