When prospective buyers of luxury mansions in Los Angeles tell you they love everything about a property, there’s a good chance they mean it literally. LA has a longstanding history of selling its massive manses, manors, and estates fully furnished. It’s a distinction that tends to catch buyers from other markets off guard. But it boils down to lifestyle, logistics, and even market dynamics. Calling it “convenience” is an oversimplification. Rather, the demand for fully-furnished mansions can be traced back to the intent at the heart of the acquisition.
Who is Most Likely to Buy These Furnished Luxury Mansions?
To borrow a cliche, a lot of wealthy people move to Los Angeles for a good time, not a long time. Maybe they’re here for a project relating to the entertainment industry. Perhaps they’re international investors who need to study the lay of the land. They could even be purchasing luxury mansions as second or third homes. For each of these reasons, the buyer would likely want a turnkey home they could use immediately without getting pulled into time-consuming furniture hunting. If they find a fully furnished option, they can move in without skipping a beat, or even come and go from the city as they please, without losing precious time on the details.
And trust us, it takes time to fill luxury mansions with art, accessories, and furniture. These aren’t small properties. A homeowner effectively furnishing a mansion to their tastes could need to devote months to the endeavor. Just think of the meetings with designers, vendors, and freight coordinators! A tastefully pre-furnished mansion skips past this to appeal directly to buyers who prioritize speed and simplicity.
Furnishing These Properties Takes Decorating to New Heights
In most cases, these luxury mansions are furnished by professional designers with results that are anything but generic. Each piece is chosen to further a variety of intentions, such as complementing architectural scale, the height of the soaring ceilings, sightlines, and, since this is California, indoor/outdoor flow. Since these properties are so unique, furniture and decor sometimes need to be tailored to a specific space. Made-to-measure rugs, oversized dining tables, and customized sectionals may work beautifully in one home, but be impossible in any other.
Therefore, when these homes hit the market, their custom furnishings become another facet of their value. Rather than purchasing a skeletal structure, the buyer is acquiring a fully-realized atmosphere. Removing the furniture sacrifices this attractive selling point.
Furniture Sold Separately
Sometimes, the furniture isn’t included in the sales price of the luxury mansions. Rather, it’s negotiated separately as an optional add-on. This strategy, offering flexibility, is popularly used when working with international buyers or situations with complicated financing. However, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all technique. Though this arrangement can help streamline negotiations, it can also come with tax implications that require professional advisory input.
Separating the personal and real property may offer sellers of luxury mansions some additional wiggle room for bargaining. During pricing negotiations, the seller can try to keep the selling price intact by offering the furnishings for added value.
When Staging Becomes “Furnishings Included”
Staging is often a massive production when luxury mansions need to be prepared for the market. We mean museum-caliber levels of installation, custom lighting, and purposeful art curation that challenge what you might expect from a living space. The right staging emphasizes a mansion’s flow and immense scale.
If a buyer plans to seldom occupy the home, these stagings become more than an example. They become a potential for a legitimate lived-in environment. And opening the floor to the added sale or inclusion of a luxury property’s furnishings can be an attractive prospect for a buyer who would normally consider furniture an afterthought, albeit a necessary one.
The Method to the Mansion Madness
Ultimately, LA’s tradition for listing fully furnished luxury mansions comes down to their role not as primary, permanent residences but rather as lifestyle assets, creative retreats, or long-term investments. By offering furnished options, buyers find the added flexibility of a turnkey solution that instantly fits the rhythms of their lives.
With a brand that says as much as JohnHart’s, Senior Copywriter Seth Styles never finds himself at a loss for words. Responsible for maintaining the voice of the company, he spends each day drafting marketing materials, blogs, bios, and agent resources that speak from the company’s collective mind and Hart… errr, heart.
Having spent over a decade in creative roles across a variety of industries, Seth brings with him vast experience in SEO practices, digital marketing, and all manner of professional writing with particular strength in blogging, content creation, and brand building. Gratitude, passion, and sincerity remain core tenets of his unwavering work ethic. The landscape of the industry changes daily, paralleling JohnHart’s efforts to {re}define real estate, but Seth works to maintain the company’s consistent message while offering both agents and clients a new echelon of service.
When not preserving the JohnHart essence in stirring copy, Seth puts his efforts into writing and illustrating an ongoing series entitled The Death of Romance. In addition, he adores spending quality time with his girlfriend and Romeo (his long-haired chihuahua mix), watching ‘70s and ‘80s horror movies, and reading (with a particular penchant for Victorian horror novels and authors Yukio Mishima and Bret Easton Ellis). He also occasionally records music as the vocalist and songwriter for his glam rock band, Peppermint Pumpkin.
