- Open homes can polarise buyers, with features like coloured splashbacks or dancing poles eliciting mixed reactions.
- Interior designer Isis Winter advises against clutter, shiny new items, and family photos during the selling process.
- Agents suggest relatable yet distinctive staging, emphasising the importance of flow and quality furniture.
When it comes to open homes, there are some things that are guaranteed to split buyer opinion. It could be an avocado bathroom, a collection of dolls, a colour-blocked book shelf, a luminous splashback, or even a dancing pole.
Start your property search
These features might give some the ick, and leave a home languishing on the market for months, but equally, they could lead to a cash offer on the spot.
Each house is different, but the agents and designers OneRoof spoke to had some pretty firm ideas about things they love to see at open homes and the things that leave them tutting.
Interior designer Isis Winter has a particular loathing of labels. “People should be criminally prosecuted for having the sign ‘eat’ in the kitchen,” she says. “You don’t need to go into a room to be told what to do by an inanimate object.”
Designer Isis Winter, pictured with her son, says homeowners should focus on selling a dream, not their own dream. Photo / Supplied
Red glass splashbacks can be polarising, and feature on Winter’s pet hate list. Photo / Getty Images
Winter is well-versed in home renovations and her agent husband, Cam Winter, frequently asks her to cast her professional eye over his clients’ upscale houses in the Bay of Plenty and Queenstown.
Winter’s no-no list for open homes also includes: everything shiny and new (“it feels soul-less, like a medical centre”); plastic flowers and plants (fresh, every time “and bonus points if the flowers are in season”); lots of cluttery little items (a few well-proportioned pieces are better); and red glass splashbacks in the kitchen (she's not alone on this one).
She’s not a fan of family photos during the selling process or of chain-store printed art canvasses (there’s a special place in hell reserved for the big-horned alpine cattle pictures that dot the country from Queenstown to the north, she says).
Discover more:
- History-making brothel for sale - 'if these walls could talk'
- Surfer cousins' quirky Hawke's Bay homes hit the market
- The Mount house that is literally going to the dogs
“The purpose of selling your house is selling the dream to somebody else. They’re not buying your dreams,” Winter tells OneRoof.
She does believe combining old pieces with newer items immediately gives a house soul, which is why she only ever does partial staging for properties for sale – removing excess pieces, rearranging furniture to make a room flow better, and finding places for boring stuff, like dressing gowns, printers, chargers and office paraphernalia.
Ray White agent Jayne Kiely, who co-hosted this year’s AA Insurance Location, Location, Location NZ show with fellow agent Paul Glover, loathes clutter but warns owners to be careful with what they do with it.
“You know, at the last minute, people pile everything into one particular cupboard. Someone at the open home opens the cupboard and there’s an avalanche of Christmas decorations, towels, blankets falling on them and they’re just standing there going ‘oh s%#t!’,” she laughs.
Ray White agent Jayne Kiely, with AA Insurance Location Location Location NZ co-host Paul Glover, says she has had to kick knickers under the bed before showing homes. Photo / Supplied
She loves personal stuff in a house – the kids’ toys in baskets, the family photos (“as long as they’re not the negligee shots”) but loathes tangles of power cords and extensions.
When the cameras weren’t rolling on LLL, she was busily picking up toys and doing a quick clean of the feature homes.
“We’ve cleaned toilets, we’ve kicked knickers under the bed. If vendors have run out the door with their kids and haven’t had the time, we’ve got a cleaning kit in the car,” she says. And while some buyers might groan at the sameness of staged furniture, Kiely says an empty room doesn’t sell.
“The furniture is for spatial awareness. People can’t visualise where they would put something.”
She says people are relaxed about colours they don’t like, realising the “wrong” shade can be fixed with a tin of paint, although she does note that a lot of her buyers don’t like coloured glass splashbacks (Kiely’s no-no is lime green).
Colour-blocking on book shelves is not to everyone’s taste. More of a worry, though, are polarising books. Photo / Getty Images
“Don’t let one little thing put you off. Worry more about the side of the street you are on and if you’re going to get good sun in the afternoon,” she says.
Ray White Remuera agent Steve Koerber says tastes are constantly changing. In years past in his Remuera patch, buyers wouldn’t go near a house with a swimming pool; now, an outdoor pool is expected.
“I think 90% of people like the idea of a pool. Homes with pools attract more people,” Koerber says.
“But the flow to the pool is incredibly important. It really does impact prices if you have to go down a lot of steps. In our area, no steps is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more.”
Koerber admits that he and wife Nila are fussy and have been known to follow the professional stagers, removing an excess chair here and adding an open-legged sofa there to visually expand a space. Even in homes that aren’t particularly expensive, the pair insist on upmarket furniture, not budget chain store stuff.
Sometimes agents have bigger things to tweak.
Bayleys Auckland agent Trent Quinton recently got the listing for a luxury penthouse apartment that had previously been pitched as a party venue, complete with a rotating vintage car that converted to a bed and bar, a dancing pole, and wall art and furniture that paid homage to Batman.
The Batman logo loomed large in the previous marketing campaign for the penthouse of the Metropolis. Photo / Supplied
Also front and centre was a dancing pole. Photo / Supplied
The apartment has been restaged to appeal to international buyers. Photo / Supplied
Quinton re-shot the pad with furniture that was less glitzy, positioning the apartment in the iconic Metropolis building to international buyers with shots of the Sky Tower and huge decks.
“The focus is on getting the place sold, so we’ve normalised it. It’s not for people wanting suburbia, it’s people wanting the city lights,” he says, adding that the new approach has yielded solid enquiry from expat buyers.
Bayleys agent Jacquie McDonald, who works with her sister Linda Simmons to prep houses for sale, says even though buyers are purchasing the house, not the contents, scruffy furniture can put people off.
“Get rid of anything that makes it feel like a student flat. Cheap and nasty stuff makes a house feel cheap and nasty. You don’t want to look like you had a cheap shopping trip to Kmart,” she said.
“And mum and dad heavy wood furniture, that’s a complete turn off.”
McDonald tells OneRoof she also gives the bookshelves a once-over before letting in prospective buyers. While she doesn’t object to colour-blocking books, she does remove anything too political or offensive.
The aim of the game is to get people to your open home and to get them to fall in love with your home, say agents. Photo / Getty Images
“And no marriage-guidance books on the bedside table,” she says. Other than that, a light touch is better than a total transformation.
“We never want people to suspect we spent hours and hours getting ready. It all looks totally natural as if this is how people always live.”
Ray White agent Jadyn Dixon, who recently sold a colourful house he had dubbed Auckland’s “Caesars Palace”, agrees that buyers mostly look for relatable staging but they’re over bland-looking homes.
“If everything is neutral, there’s no chance to fall in love. When people take a risk enough to make it a bit different, that’s cool,” he says.
He says that with the Glenfield house, buyers recognised the house had a quality job done to it, even if the extreme decor was polarising for some.
“But when I pointed out things like the kitchen, the bathrooms and so on could be made pretty neutral pretty easily, people said, ‘Oh no, we’d feel awful to change it out after all that work’.”
Buyers were impressed by the quality of work of a house in Glenfield, Auckland, which had been billed as "Caesars Palace". Photo / Supplied
Designer Laura Heynike says bland decor makes her cringe. Photo / Fiona Goodall
Laura Heynike, founder and creative director of Pocketspace Interiors, says her studio team had just quickly fired off a list of things they hate in open homes when OneRoof called. The list included: tacky door mats (and ones with cheesy sayings get the extra thumbs down); printed glass splashbacks with Kiwiana patterns (“we explain we can bring in patterns through artwork or cushion or something temporary”); and contoured mats around the toilet (“fluffy, unhygienic, and we want to see the condition of the floor underneath. What are you hiding is my first thought?”).
Like Dixon, Heynike is over the Scandi-neutral look many homes on the market have. “It makes me cringe. It’s not memorable and it actually takes away from the house,” she says, adding that she finds colour is good because it is memorable. Good art can do the same job, even though it’s not staying in the house.
“Make your place a bit more memorable than the other one down the road,” she says.
- Click here to find properties for sale in New Zealand
