Selling the house

“A rational home buyer would start with the floor plan, to see the layout and the sizes of the rooms, and only then look at the photos,” our real estate agent said. “But home buyers in the Netherlands are not rational. They start with the photos.”

The largest website for real estate in the Netherlands is funda, which is run by the largest real estate agent association in the Netherlands. You can filter on criteria (location, price range, minimum number of bedrooms, minimum size, etc.) and lots of people have a saved search with their ‘hard’ criteria — sometimes because they’re seriously looking, and sometimes just for fun! (This is also how we found our new house!) As a seller, there’s not much you can do to influence the ‘hard’ properties of your home (though you can set the asking price to either include or exclude a certain price range…). But there’s a lot you can do to influence the result.

To make a good sale, you need to get a high bid. And getting more bids means you have more choice — and if potential buyers know there is a lot of demand for the house, the bids will generally be higher. In order to get people to bid, you need to get people to do a viewing. And in order to get people contact the agent for a viewing, they need to decide they are interested. And, because most of them are not rational, they make that decision based on the ~vibes~ of the photos. The photos with our furniture, that will be removed when the buyer would get the house, etc. In fact, critiquing photos on funda is some kind of national pastime…

So to get viewings, you need to have the right photos. And the type of photos that work best, is where the rooms are mostly empty and white. Because you’re selling the space, and the furniture only serves to ‘define’ the space.

And our house is anything but empty. We complained to the agent that it would be a lot of work. He shrugged. “You have to clear out everything anyway!” And he was right.

The past three months we have been working so, so hard to present our house optimally. We have a family home with the two of us, so it was easy to acquire something and just put it somewhere it would not be in the way — so there was never any reason to clean up. But now there was a very good reason: we want to sell our house as good as possible — we have massive budget overruns in our renovation project in the new house! And we’re not quite finished, but it’s nearing completion. The appointment for the photo shoot has been made, and the viewings will be scheduled while we are away on the annual vacation on Texel.

We got rid of a lot of stuff — either through a second-hand shop, through friends, but also a lot of things were simply discarded. A lot of things had been given to us. My father was fond of saying: “Small gifts keep friendships lively” and while that is true, his favourite type of small gift were cheap sets of tools. Always useful to have a set of screwdriver heads, but we probably do not need seven… And there were also some things we inherited from grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. Some of it is very nice, like a set of gloves and matching handkerchiefs from the great-aunt, but there is no realistic scenario where we would ever do something with them. And we don’t get the people back by storing their stuff somewhere in a dusty corner of our house… It had to go.

That’s another thing. We lived here for 19 years. Our parents helped us get settled in when we bought it: our mothers hung the wallpaper, our fathers hacked away a piece of a doorpost so the washing machine could fully open, my father-in-law helped us saw and install the stone for the edge of the pond klik dug. We’re leaving all those things behind — and while our mothers are alive today, our fathers will not place their stamp on our new house. Mikan will never explore the new house. We’re leaving a lot of things behind, though of course the memories will stay with us.

Seeing the house become more empty is a reminder that in three months, it will not be our home anymore. And after nineteen years, that is a reason for some contemplation.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.