Americans have strange attitudes regarding real estate. One of which is a belief that in order to sell a house, it must be in immaculate condition, with no sign that human habitation has ever occurred there.
Which is why I’m asking about jigsaw puzzles.
I just bought a puzzle with 500 pieces. And since I have a cat, I can’t just leave the semi-finished puzzle out on the table top.
So I bought a roll-up puzzle-mat, on which to work the puzzle, and then roll it up around a tube, so it can be stored and later unrolled on the table to continue working.
The mat has instructions-- on youtube,-- in which a woman demonstrates how to use it. And the woman begins her video explaining why the mat is so important, saying she wanted to sell her house, and “of course, I had to put the puzzle away so we could put the house on the market.”
I’ve bought and sold 3 houses in my life (not in America), and I sure never worried about seeing a jigsaw puzzle on the table. I looked at the important stuff: layout of the rooms, size of the windows, closet space, whether I like the kitchen, etc. I definitely prefer to see the house a little messy,the way people actually live. Example: if the teenager’s clothes are draped over the shower rod–that gives me a hint, say, to check where the clothes hamper is. Maybe it’s a little inconvenient, but I would not have noticed such a small detail while viewing the rest of the house. .
So anyway,my fellow Dopers here is the Great Debate which must be solved : please answer my simple question, stated above as “HUH?”
When making a $200,000 decision about buying a house, would you let a jigsaw puzzle on the table affect your decision?
The theory in residential real estate is that, the more generically “beautiful” the interior of your house looks, the easier it is for prospective buyers to imagine themselves living in it.
This, it is believed, makes them more likely to buy. It may not be conscious on the part of the prospective buyer.
Too much clutter, too many personal items (eg, your family photos, your kids’ trophies, your collection of rare Australian butterflies mounted and framed on the kitchen walls, that beautiful eggplant shade of paint that you just adore, and with which you painted every wall in the living room, the breakfast dishes still in the sink, etc.) tend to distract prospective buyers in a negative way.
But so much of this depends on the market – buyers’ vs. sellers’ markets, and … customers can be and are ‘conditioned’ toward certain behaviors.
So it may be yet another self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
It does seem to work, though, at least in many cases: making a for-sale home less cluttered, more generic, and – in many cases – “staging” it for sale (ie, removing basically all of your stuff and having a sort of interior decorator come in and furnish/finish it specifically to attract more buyer interest).
On the one hand - Y’know, I could say that I wouldn’t let a visible jigsaw puzzle affect my decision, but I also know that my subconscious does things that I am not aware of. A puzzle itself communicates “something” about the seller (they are person that does jigsaw puzzles, is that good or bad?), and the subject of the puzzle also communicates “something”. All of those things occupy some brain-space in the buyer, whether they acknowledge it or not. So, best to go generic.
On the other hand - “Wow! This man cave full of sports stuff is AWESOME! That is so ME!”
I wrote this elsewhere, and during the DJT administration (in response to people screaming things like “Somebody add some credibility to this article, by sharing a story of anyone they know, that was duped by Russia, into voting for Trump”), but I think the point applies here, and is meant to amplify what I wrote above:
In 2018, US companies spent $150 BILLION dollars on advertising. They don’t do that because they’re stupid, get tax deductions, and enjoy flushing billions and billions of dollars down the drain. Marketing, advertising, and propaganda are profoundly effective, particularly among certain demographics.
Most of us wouldn’t want to admit how much/easily we’re actually swayed by all of this stuff, but …
When my brother retired and put his McMansion on the market, the realty company brought in a video crew. They shot video of the house, interior and exterior, right after cleaners cleaned everything. A drone was used to shoot “the neighborhood”. They had him move into an apartment.
Watching the video, I was seriously wishing I could afford such a palace!
The house sold for enough above the initial asking price to pay for the video production.
And here, I was thinking when I saw the title that this was supposed to go the other way: That having a jigsaw puzzle sitting out would make the house look more “homey”, like a place that real people would live in.
And I know that some of the standard interior-decorating techniques definitely wouldn’t work on me: When I see a bookcase with all of the spines facing the wall, for instance, it makes me angry, and I can’t imagine that making the buyer angry helps close a deal. Seriously, how did that fad even arise?
There are no houses this cheap in Berlin anymore, I would buy it puzzle and all.
On the other hand, I remember clicking in disbelief at the pictures in immoweb in Brussels, where I saw dirty underwear strewn across the floor in more than one offer. Those we decided not to consider further.
I understand the logic, but I don’t think it works for me. I don’t want to see a sterile, empty house. If the seller has personal photos on the wall, it makes the house seem more human, more inviting to me. If I step on a piece of Lego on the floor of the living room, it makes me think of how I would raise my child here–maybe there isn’t enough room in the kid’s bedroom for all his toys, so he plays out here? Or maybe there’s a nice archway here in the kitchen so I can watch the kid while I’m working in the kitchen.
For me, I prefer the humanized look, not a view from a drone, carefully edited to jump over the bad stuff, or leave it out of focus in the background while the smooth-talking guys from “Mad Men” manipulate me.
But that’s just me, I guess.
no, they do it because they have been manipulated by the same ad agencies they are using to manipulate their customers. Just like putting a puzzle on a table in a house for sale, companies are told “you NEED to do this!” by their agencies. So they do it.
If manipulative advertising works, why would one not believe it works on the advertising agency’s own clients?
I think a puzzle left out would be a positive.
As a buyer you’re always thinking “I wonder how much wear and tear the previous owner put on this place?” Kids playing ball in the house? Lot’s of entertaining guests? Was the kitchen used every day? How many people lived here? Big dogs running around the house?
So you try to look for any visual clues you can about how these unknown to you people lived.
I think psychologically a puzzle left on a table gives a message of “oh, these people liked to engage in quiet less active things like puzzles. Maybe they just lived quietly? No bouncing off the walls running up and down stairs.” Which may or may not be true but a puzzle left out gives the perception of.
Realtors want you to be able to envision the way you would live in the space. If it reflects too much how someone else IS living in the space, it may limit what the buyer sees as possible.
And clutter, even visual clutter everyone is used to, like kitchen appliances, shoes by the door, photos on walls, ALL make a space SEEM smaller. If you’re looking to sell, that’s NOT good.
And, if the house looks a little too lived in, lawn not very well maintained, patios, garages, basements and attics, all unorganized, cluttered messes, a LOT of people are going to assume regular maintenance of house systems is unlikely. And, maybe they didn’t clear it up because there’s something you DON’T want them to see, underneath it all.
I’ve got a feeling we’re really atypical buyers. We have looked beyond furnishings and wall colors and even a house filled with hunting trophies (including 3 bears!!!) Cleanliness and minimal clutter is good, mostly because I don’t want to be tripping over someone else’s crap. I don’t think I ever was put off by family photos, but I would think twice if the place reeked of cigarette smoke. Nor would I care about furnishings, apart from a mental comparison to the size of my stuff to determine how well it would fit.
Here’s our house the day we took possession - you can imagine what the furnishings were like:
Dining room
Den
Kitchen
Master bath
I feel safe saying a jigsaw puzzle wouldn’t have made any difference. And within 4 months, we did a major upgrade, with several other improvements over the years. You’d never recognize it today.
I remember touring one house in particular when we were planning a move to Texas.
Beyond being forbiddingly dark (opening the curtains risked fading the rug?) it was festooned with momentos, photos, knicknacks, religious objects etc., making one think that moving there would disrupt generations of family history. Not a good look.
Knowing that the present owner was working on a jigsaw puzzle would not have bothered me in the least. What matters is that the place is clean and well-kept. Otherwise, features like animal heads on the walls, gun cabinets, wastebaskets designed to look like giant beer cans - no problem.
At least at our company the people we pay to develop and deploy advertising are different from the people we employ to measure the effectiveness of advertising. And we can see a pretty strong correlation between our sales AND customer perception of price and quality when we are advertising vs when we aren’t. Note that our price and quality does not actually vary. We just either shout about it or we don’t.
A lot of people totally lack imagination. If they see a house that’s “lived in,” or anything like that, they simply cannot look beyond that to imagine themselves living there.
Dave Ramsey, as part of his Financial Peace University, tells a story about a couple who was offered the chance to buy a house way below market value (something like $65-70k below market) by somebody who wanted to help them out. The couple rejected the house–because they didn’t like the carpet that the house currently had.
Never mind the fact that they could have re-carpeted the house twice over and still come out well ahead; they couldn’t see beyond their noses.
They can’t imagine themselves living in it and putting together a jigsaw puzzle?
We just bought a house ( a second home in the country) and the people who lived there were weird as fuck and didn’t fix or update anything:
Sagging septic pipe
Old central air unit
Didn’t change water filter
Loose door knobs
Patio door not aligned properly
Rugs not laid properly. Also…white?
Swimming pool pump/filter system disassembled
Left some old patio umbrellas with rotting draw strings
Trim, doors, and banisters inconsistently unfinished as if they are trying to pass off laziness as an intentional artistic statement
Lack of landscaping
Lack of proper access to the attic (it’s just a small hole above one of the closets. More the developers fault, but who decides that the attic ladder is where you want to save money?)
Some of this stuff requires some time or $ to fix. But a lot of it I fixed in a few minutes with some basic tools and a trip to Ace Hardware.
