When Grandma’s Furniture Is The First Thing A Buyer Sees

We’ve mentioned grandma’s furniture before in a couple of these, and here it is again, because Jules and I keep running into it. We’ll be going through listing photos for higher-end homes around Bluffton — Belfair, Hampton Hall, communities like that — and there it is in one home, and then the next one, and then the one after that. The same dark antique pieces. The same big patterned rug. At some point you start to wonder if everybody in town is renting the same furniture from the same grandmother for their listing photos. We didn’t know grandma knew so many people.

And we’ll say what we always say, because it’s true — we love grandma. She’s sweet. The furniture is usually genuinely nice furniture, real pieces, things with a story behind them. This isn’t a knock on anybody’s taste. But here’s the actual problem, and it’s worth a seller understanding it before the photos get taken: when a buyer walks into a room and the first thing they think is “that looks like my grandmother’s furniture, I miss grandma,” they have just stopped thinking about your house. And you do not want a buyer thinking about grandma when they’re standing in the home you’re trying to sell. You want them thinking about the home.

That’s really what this comes down to. It’s all about where a buyer’s eye goes. You can have a ginormous, beautiful, open room — the kind of space that’s perfect for a family, the kind of room people say they want — and a buyer will walk in and their eye will land on the rug. Or the dark, heavy chairs. Or the bronze statue on the side table. They’ll be looking at the furniture, and somehow they won’t have really noticed the beautiful open kitchen sitting right behind it, or the way the light comes through the back windows, or how the room actually flows. The house is the thing they came to see. The furniture is what they end up looking at.

It happens because certain furniture just pulls the eye. Dark, heavy pieces stand out against a light room. A rug with a lot of pattern and a lot of color sits there in the middle of the floor and demands attention. None of it is bad — a lot of it is beautiful on its own — it’s just that it’s to taste, and a strong piece of furniture in a photograph or a showing competes with the room instead of supporting it. The buyer’s attention is a limited thing. Whatever the furniture takes, the house doesn’t get.

The good news for a seller is that the fix here is usually not expensive, and it’s not a renovation. A lot of the time it’s as simple as rearranging what’s already there — moving the heavy pieces, pulling a few things out of the room, letting the space breathe so the eye travels to the room itself instead of stopping on one object. The furniture doesn’t have to be replaced. It usually just has to be edited and moved.

The chandelier is another one worth looking at, because a chandelier is often the very first thing a buyer sees when they walk into a nice room — it’s up high, it’s lit, the eye goes straight to it. A dated chandelier, even one that’s genuinely pretty and has a story behind it, can quietly set the tone of the whole room before the buyer has looked at anything else. And a chandelier is not an expensive thing to change. For what it does to the first impression of a room, swapping a dated fixture for something cleaner is one of the better small-dollar moves a seller can make before listing.

This is the kind of thing Jules and I walk through with sellers before the photos ever happen. We have a designer we work with — someone we know well, someone with a genuinely good eye — and a lot of what she does isn’t bringing in a truckload of new furniture. It’s working with what the seller already owns. She knows which pieces to move, which ones to set aside for a few weeks, where the eye is going to land when someone walks through the door, and how to arrange a room so the room is the thing the buyer notices. She can supplement with pieces of her own where a room needs it, but most of the work is editing, not replacing.

At the higher end especially, this matters, because the homes themselves are usually beautiful. The bones are there. The space is there. When a home like that sits on the market longer than it should, it’s often not the house at all — it’s that the photos and the showings are quietly pointing the buyer’s eye at the wrong thing.

For more on this read: Spending Money In The Right Places Before Listing A Home

So if you’re getting ready to list a home in Belfair, Hampton Hall, or anywhere around Bluffton where the home deserves to be seen on its own merits, that walk-through — figuring out where a buyer’s eye is going to go, and making sure it goes to the house — is one of the first things Jules and I do with our sellers. And grandma’s furniture, wherever it came from, we’ll know what to do with it.

Jeff & Jules Moran

Anchor & Isle Real Estate

Bluffton & Hilton Head Island

Strategic Marketing. Experienced Negotiation. Real Results.

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