Home Staging Tips & Tricks
Home Staging Tips & Tricks
What is Home Staging?
Home Staging is the art of setting
a home to look it's best for sale.
It is a proven marketing tool
to sell homes faster in a slow market
and for more money in a hot market.
Home Staging is more than furnishing an empty home.
It also involves consulting with owners of occupied homes assisting them with preparing their home to sell,
de-cluttering, de-personalizing and quite often rearranging the existing furnishings making the home appear more spacious. This method allows the prospective buyer the ability to visualize himself or herself living in the home.
As the real estate industry stresses: The first impression is the key factor in selling a home.
Typically a potential buyer makes up their mind ten seconds after they step in the front door. They are already forming an opinion as they pull into the driveway. That doesn't leave too much room for fault. To achieve the greatest possible outcome, a home should always be presented at its best the first time around.
In 1985 Barb Schwarz pioneered and created the “Staging™” concept spreading the mission of home staging to millions. She states that “your investment in home staging will always be less than your first price reduction” if the house is staged appropriately and priced correctly.
Statistics have shown that staged homes spend 80% less time on the market than
non-staged homes and sell on an average of 17% higher than an un-staged home.
Staging is the art of setting a home up to look its best. Your home is your home until you make a decision to sell it. Then it becomes a marketable product. Like any product, it has feature, benefits, pluses, minuses and competition. To become competitive your home needs to look better than any other home in that price range.
Buying a home is an emotional experience…it’s about buying dream. Staging creates a lifestyle or ambiance. It projects an existence free of clutter, exposed television wires and overflowing desks in the bedroom. “Staging is about selling a fantasy of the way people really want to live.”
Staging is not however about deceiving buyers… Painting over water stains on the ceiling or placing furniture in front of a crack in the wall. It is however about hanging a drape over a window that overlooks a busy street or placing a plant in front of an unsightly electrical outlet.
Only 10% of home buyers can visualize the potential of a home. That is why staging a home is critical. You don’t want the advantages of a home overlooked and left up to the buyer’s imagination. Most buyers begin to make a decision about a prospective house within the first six feet of entering the property. It is essential that they like what they see immediately and that your hard work and effort has made a good first and lasting impression.