Staging offers buyers clean slate visions

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Published Date 3/20/2018

Realtors spend a lot of time explaining why home staging is a must, but some sellers resist, rationalizing how quickly homes are selling these days. They wonder why they must part with those up-front dollars even before their home is listed. What many don’t understand, however, is that staging is no longer optional for sellers who want to get the most value from their home, even in a crazy sellers’ market like the current one.

If you are a seller or potential seller, it’s wise to try to overcome your skepticism by taking in the following points:

There is a huge difference between decorating and staging. Your home decor is a reflection of you — a collection of memories, belongings, and a canvas that represents your style. Staging, however, is more like merchandising. Your décor choices are intensely personal, making most buyers to wonder how your home might look if your taste was removed from the equation. For instance, if you were a fly on the wall listening to people walking through your house with their Realtor, you may hear comments about how small the family room looks with your oversized sectional, or how dark your master bedroom appears because you love burgundies and dark blues. As for that collection of figurines, your grandmother started, and you took over? Displaying them may seem attractive to you, but they serve as a distraction to a potential buyer.

Take your choice — staging or a possible price reduction? Staging sets a home apart from the competition. But even if ALL the listings were professionally staged in your area, NOT staging your home would make it look out of place among its competitors. Updating decor, particularly in key rooms such as kitchens and baths, can mean the difference between selling quickly and for top dollar or facing a price reduction when your home stops attracting buyers. Busy, cluttered decor or outdated styles generally represent both time and money to the prospective buyer, who envisions having to replace your 1975 wallpaper, removing heavy drapery to let in more light, or even picturing what your kitchen counters might look like without a ton of handy little appliances cluttering them.

It’s stressful when your home doesn’t sell. So why set yourself up for it by trying to test the market? They say selling your home is among the most emotionally tumultuous times in one’s life, along with divorce and the death of a loved one. Not staging your home means you have chosen to stack the deck against yourself. At the very minimum, permit a home stager to come in on a consultative basis and give you recommendations on what to box up early and what can stay to make the house look homier. But prepare yourself: it’s vital not to consider what he or she says as an insult. Stagers are marketing experts who pride themselves on helping you sell your home for the highest price in the shortest amount of time, just like your Realtor.

In controlled tests conducted by the Real Estate Staging Association that compared identical homes, the non-staged houses sold in 102 days, while the professionally staged properties sold in 45 days.

There are levels of staging, so pay close attention to your stager’s recommendations. For example, you may receive a 5-page recommendation from a stager, leaving shopping for updated décor and doing updates on your own. If the thought of that doesn’t overwhelm you, then have at it. It may mean choosing paint colors, selecting updated lighting fixtures, or incorporating the right style trends to make your spaces vibrant and engaging to today’s buyers. It’s up to you to muster up the energy, time and creativity to implement those recommendations.

The important thing to remember is that the moment your home goes on the market, it becomes a house again — a place someone else will eventually turn into a home. Offering buyers a clean slate by using the services of a professional home stager can make the difference between frustrating selling memories and creating a new vision for its next occupant.

Source: TBWS

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