Hats off to home stylists! We’re always amazed, and even more so in the current housing market environment, at the way a really great home stylist can transform an ordinary house into a dream come true. Even now, when there are a gazillion properties on the market for sale, the gifted property stylist can make even the pickiest home-buyers fall in love. House styling for sale is not nearly as easy as you might think. The process may look simple, but it requires gifts and skills that most of us never think about. Here are just a few of the things they must know in order to be successful.

The Buyer’s Colour Choices

Every shade of every colour in the spectrum has a psychological impact on the viewer. Hospitals, prisons, and even restaurant chains know this fact and employ certain colour combinations to inspire feelings of confidence, tranquillity, or to enhance the hunger response in their clientele. For the rest of your life, you will now notice that every fast food chain restaurant you enter is decorated in red and yellow – colours that make you feel as if you should order two hamburgers, not one.

A good home stylist may not actually be able to identify individual buyers’ faves, but they do know what combinations are popular with certain age groups and people of certain income ranges. If your house is going to appeal to thirty-something professionals, your home stylist will ask you to paint the walls in colours that speak to this group.

The Buyer’s Hobbies

The things your buyer chooses to do in his/her spare time equates precisely with what makes them feel secure and successful. Those feelings are near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as it relates to human happiness. Your home stylist studies relentlessly to know how buyers in each age group or buying niche spend their holidays. This enables stylists to know what subliminal messages to send buyers when they enter a house.

If all people in their 20s want to surf or to climb mountains in their off-time (and not all of them do, but a good portion of them will respond positively to these triggers) then mountains and/or waves will be featured in the art pieces around the house.

For older buyers, perhaps beautiful gardens and stately homes make them feel good – even when they don’t actually look at the painting or the way the handsome books are lined up on the shelves. They feel the impression as much as they see it.

Symbols of Success

In each age group there are symbols that signal having “arrived.” For the millennials, it might be a patio complete with outdoor kitchen. For the boomers it could be a swimming pool or a spa tub or even a woodworking workshop in the back yard. You can bet, though, that the buyer will be looking for these status symbols as they look at your house’s online photos or actually visit in person to inspect the property. Success is another one of the needs that chime into the Maslow model.

Fine Tuning

There are also many triggers that speak to the place in the brain where the safety and security of the buyer lives. These can be scents, textures, or even the way towels in the bathroom are presented. Or the way footsteps sound on the floor of the entry. These can be buried so deeply in the buyer’s brain that they never even notice it. Home styling for sale involves many tiny gems that your stylist must string together to create an irresistible impression.

The fact is, unless you have this level of knowledge about the buyers who will be interested in your house, you’re not nearly well equipped enough. Handling your own home staging project is far more meticulous than you might imagine.

Good home stylists work daily to keep their fingers on the pulse of consumers in order to do their jobs well. They gather information from surveys, studies and focus groups and use it to flavour the presentation of the houses they transform. House styling for sale involves far more than knowing what colour to paint the bathroom. If you’re looking to profit handsomely from the sale of your house, make sure your stylist has the right toolbox.

Image courtesy of Annabel James.