Staging Your Home for a Faster Sale
How Home Staging Can Improve the Sales Price of Your Home
Making a great first impression is just as important in real estate as it is in real life.
This is even more important if you’re selling a house in a competitive market. You want to do everything possible to guarantee a fast, high-offer sale. And as it turns out, staging your home ranks high among some of these things.
This guide has been compiled to help you understand how home staging can help you improve the sales price of your home, as well as how to do it right.
But before then, what exactly is staging, to begin with?
What is staging?
In a piece published in The New York Times, Tim Mckeough wrote of staging as an art.
That definition is apt since staging is more than just moving a few pieces of furniture around. Staging is an art you have to perfect to appeal to the maximum possible number of potential buyers. It involves careful planning and a certain level of professionalism.
While preparing the house for sale, you want to create an environment that is welcoming, appealing, and promising to potential buyers. Professional home stagers achieve this by highlighting the best aspects and features of your home.
What’s involved in home staging?
Home staging consultants will help you neutralize the spaces within your home.
They’ll help you transform your space to portray the kind of lifestyle most buyers want to see. In the process, they’ll help you get rid of functional or organizational deficiencies that could have negative psychological effects on potential buyers.
If you have an eye for good design, you may be able to transform the space within your home to appeal to buyers. However, a professional home stager brings much more value to the table.
Home staging consultants do several things that may involve;
- A general assessment of your home’s condition
- Assessment of the painting and color within the house
- Assessment and improvement of your use of space
- Checking and improving traffic flow within the home
- Getting rid of clutter, personal effects and other deficiencies, etc
Painting, renovations, deep cleaning, lighting changes, etc could also be involved.
Various home staging consultants offer various home staging packages depending on the clients’ budgets. The end goal is to transform your living space into a buyer’s dream house so you can sell fast and for top dollar.
How does staging help open houses?
While buying a house is often one of the biggest financial decisions for most people, we can’t deny that this process still involves a lot of emotions.
Most potential buyers who would show up at your open house are already in love with your neighborhood. It’s now up to you to leverage the open house to wow and impress them to the point where they fall in love with your house. Now, that’s where excellent home staging comes in.
Staging will make your house show-room ready for open houses.
Most buyers would visualize themselves as future owners living in a particular home before they commit to buying it. Proper staging helps you trigger this emotional connection so the potential buyers can envisage themselves living in that house.
Potential buyers who develop an emotional connection tends to value the house more.
This emotional impact positively influences their perception of the home as well as its value. Perhaps this is the reason why staged homes sell for 17% more on average, compared to non-staged homes.
Is Home Staging Right for You?
Home staging is always in the seller’s interest.
If you’re looking to sell your house fast and at a great price, staging should rank high on your to-do list. And this is not just words, there are enough data and statistics to back this up.
According to Forbes;
- You stand to gain $400 on every $100 you invest in home staging!
- Staged homes sell 17% more on average than non-staged homes.
- Staged homes sell 87% faster (11 days or less) on average compared to non-staged homes
That’s not all.
More data from the National Association of Realtors revealed that;
- 22% of seller’s agents reported up to a 5% increase in the price of staged homes.
- 17% of these agents reported up to a 10% increase on average in the price of staged homes they sold.
- 2% of seller’s agents reported up to 20% on most median-priced homes (that’s like a whopping $51,880 more).
- 28% of realtors say they stage all their listings
- 45% of realtors say they always advise sellers on staging but don’t get directly involved.
- 13% say they only stage homes when the property seems difficult to sell, and
- 7% of realtors say they only stage homes with
Here’s the takeaway;
Regardless of the value of your home, staging is almost always a smart decision.
If you’re finding it difficult to sell or you’re in a highly competitive market, staging will help your property stand out so it can sell faster. It will also help improve buyers’ perception of your house and make it seem more valuable to attract the high-value offers.
Again, even if your budget for staging is not much, you can expect a whopping 400% return on average, on every dollar that goes into this.
If done right, staging is more than worth it!
What to look for when hiring a staging professional
Home staging will help make your property much more appealing and valuable.
However, all home stagers are not equal. The home staging industry is largely unregulated at the moment. But there are still some things that make great stagers great. Here are a few things you should consider when looking for the right staging professional;
- Credibility/Reputation: Credibility is key. Check out their website or other online sources for positive reviews and testimonials from past clients. Additionally, only hire home stagers with a viable website, portfolio, or office address.
- Proven track record: Experience matters and your chosen home stagers should at least be able to tell you about some of the homes they’ve staged and sold successfully.
- Value over price: Hire someone who can offer great value and not the cheapest stager out there. Ask them about their value, strategies and how they plan to help improve your sale.
- Certification: good staging requires some level of professionalism. Hire only those with the skills, training, and experience rather than hobbyists who are only into decoration as a side hustle.
Bottom Line
Three things are vital to successful real estate sales. These are;
- Location (which is out of your control),
- Price (which is dictated by market factors), and
- The condition of your property.
While you may not have control of the first two, you can always take action to influence the condition of your property to sell for the best possible price.
Professional home staging will help you transform your house into a buyer’s dream home. This will help make your home appealing and much more valuable to a large number of potential buyers. This will be needed if you want to sell fast and for top dollar.