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Before I ever handed anyone a set of keys, I spent a number of years working in television and production. People tend to assume that chapter has nothing to do with selling homes in Lake Oswego. I used to think so too.
The longer I do this, the more certain I am that they are the same job wearing different clothes.
Real estate is a show. It has a cast, a set, a script, and an opening night. And like any show, it either holds its audience or loses them in the first five minutes.
Here is the part worth saying plainly, especially right now. The market is not the problem. Lake Oswego remains one of the strongest luxury markets in Oregon, premium inventory is limited, buyer demand is steady from both regional and out-of-state buyers, and in my experience well-positioned homes are still selling in a matter of weeks, not months.
So when a high-end home sits, and some do, it is tempting to blame the headlines, the rates, the economy. But in a market this healthy, a home that fails to sell almost never has a market problem. It has a production problem. After years working behind the camera, those problems are easy for me to spot, because they are the same ones that sink a television show.
The first is a premise the audience doesn’t buy. In television, if the setup isn’t believable, nothing that follows matters, the viewer is already gone. In real estate, the premise is the price. An overpriced luxury listing is a show asking its audience to accept something they know isn’t true, and buyers in this market are far too informed to play along.
I’ve watched it happen again and again: overpriced homes lose buyer momentum fast, and they rarely recover it without a reduction. The right price isn’t what a seller hopes the home is worth, or what the neighbor is asking. It is what recent closed sales say it is. Get the premise right and the audience leans in. Get it wrong and they change the channel before the second scene.
The second is weak production value. A great script shot badly still fails. In luxury real estate, the “shoot” is everything a buyer actually sees, the staging, the photography, the way a home is presented the moment it goes live.
Too many agents treat a two-million-dollar listing with the same production budget as a starter home, and it shows. A high-end buyer walking into a poorly staged home feels exactly what a viewer feels watching a cheap set: this isn’t for me. Presentation is not decoration. It is the difference between a home that looks like the money it’s asking and one that looks like it’s hoping.
The third, and the one almost everyone ignores, is not knowing the audience. The first question in any production is never “what do we want to say.” It’s “who is watching, and what do they want?”
Luxury buyers in Lake Oswego are not one crowd. Some are relocating executives and professional athletes who need turnkey and have no appetite for a project. Some are move-up buyers chasing a specific school or a specific stretch of waterfront. Each one wants a different story told about the same house. An agent who doesn’t know who is actually in the audience is marketing to no one, and a home marketed to no one in particular resonates with no one in particular.
This is where those years in television quietly earn their keep. I was trained to answer one question before anything else: how do you hold an audience’s attention and give them a reason to care? That is not a tangent from what I do now. It is the whole job. Pricing a home is writing a premise people believe. Preparing and presenting it is production. Marketing it is knowing precisely who is watching and giving them a show made for them.
The good news for anyone thinking about selling here is that the hard part, the market, is already working in your favor. Lake Oswego is doing its job. The only variable left is whether your home is put on the way a home in this market deserves to be. Do that well, and in a market this strong, you don’t just sell. You sell quickly, and you sell for what the home is truly worth.
If you’re considering selling your Lake Oswego home and you’d like it handled by someone who treats the whole thing as the production it actually is, I’d love to talk. Call or text me at (503) 850-8776, email me at will@fendonproperties.com, or visit fendonproperties.com. Let’s put on a show worth watching.
