When I sat down with my clients to discuss selling their house, after we were already under contract on their dream home up north, my client said to me, “My coworker told me you’re going to tell me to remove all of my old, ugly stuff and bring in all of yours.” His coworker was the one who referred him to me, which made this even funnier. And honestly? It’s usually the truth. I love staging a house, and most of the time I’m going to tell you to pack up a good portion of your stuff and let me bring in some things that are going to photograph well and appeal to buyers.
But this house was different. The market was different too, and I knew we needed to be really intentional about who we were trying to attract. This wasn’t a house that was going to appeal to every buyer, and I didn’t think we should try to make it. I knew there was a certain type of buyer who would walk into this house, immediately recognize what a gem it was, and not need to sit around for three days thinking about whether they liked it. We just needed to get that buyer through the door.
Which brings me to the hat.
When I came over to make sure the house was ready for the photographer, I brought one small box of staging stuff. That was it. A few fake plants, some crisp pillows, a couple of my usual things…and a flat-brimmed hat.
Instead of taking everything out of the house and replacing it with my stuff, I left almost all of theirs. I was picturing a buyer who would fall in love with the character, the quirks, and the obvious care the people who lived there had taken of this home. The scuffs in the original hardwood floors wouldn’t bother them. They wouldn’t walk into the bathroom, see the brown floral tile and immediately start calculating what it would cost to rip it out. In fact, I thought they might actually admire it.
I wanted them to notice the sellers’ collection of decor that had come from vacations, the heirlooms that had been passed down from relatives, and all of the little things that made the house feel like their house. My modern staging pieces couldn’t touch the feeling of this well-loved, well-lived-in home, and honestly, I didn’t want them to.
BUT.
I could see the person buying this house wearing a flat-brimmed hat.
Don’t ask me why. 😂 I just could.
So I put one out.
My client definitely thought it was a strange addition to the decor, and we joked throughout the process that the hat was going to be the thing that sold the house. And obviously, I’m not actually claiming that someone walked into the house, saw a hat sitting there and decided to write an offer.
But I do think the hat had something to do with the way I was “profiling” the buyer we were trying to capture. I had a picture in my head of the person who would love this house. What they would appreciate. What they wouldn’t care about. What someone else might call dated that they would see as original and charming. And instead of trying to turn the house into something it wasn’t, we leaned into exactly what it was.
And it worked.
We didn’t get dozens of showings. In fact, we didn’t get any. We had four groups come through the open house, and the very last group through the door was our buyer.
That’s one of the things I think gets missed when people talk about marketing a house. The goal isn’t always to make every single person love it. Sometimes the goal is to understand exactly who is most likely to love it and make sure that when they see it, they get it.
There are plenty of houses where I’m going to tell you to pack up half your stuff, take down the family photos, move some furniture around and let me bring in a carload of staging. But there are also houses where doing that would take away the very thing we should be selling.
This was one of those houses.
So, did the flat-brimmed hat sell the house?
Probably not.
But I’m also not totally convinced it didn’t. 😂
