Have you ever walked into a home for sale and immediately said ‘No’? Simply put, home staging is anything done to avoid that!
When you are making the largest purchase in your life, all you need is one small reason to not take the leap. Picture yourself stepping into a 3 Bed, 2 bath craftsman style home. It was built only 4 years ago. This home is listed for $20,000 under your budget and is walking distance from both work, and your child’s school. It sits on half an acre of land- just enough to give you some distance between other properties, but can be easily mowed within a couple of hours. The neighborhood is great, with no HOA fees- but everyone maintains their home beautifully.
Sounds great, right? Until you walk in the front door.
For starters, the front porch is disgusting- covered in mildew, making you wonder what else may be neglected, and you’re already calculating the cost of getting it clean. Once you’re through the door you discover the house to be painted a lovely shade of neon orange. You look at your spouse, who’s complexion looks like he went through a bad batch of self-tanner because of the wall color casting its traffic-cone-characteristics onto everyone who enters.
Again, you think “How much will the new paint job cost me?” (We’re starting a pattern here)
To the left, is a dining room with 12 chairs tightly squeezed around an 8 foot table with an office set up at one end of it, 6 stacks of bills and paperwork, 3 different kinds of storage furniture overflowing with fine china they’ve never used, 2 fake plants, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Your next 3 questions are “This dining room isn’t large enough to accomodate a table for guests?”, “There’s no designated office space?”, and “How will we ever store our items, if the home can’t accommodate theirs?”
Lastly, you step into the living room.
You first notice the 86″ TV sitting on a dresser (not a console, a dresser) next to the fireplace, in front of the windows. Speaking of windows, they are covered by blackout curtains- keeping the room nice and… dark. The furniture in the living room consists of 3 power reclining sofas, with cords pulled across the room to reach the nearest plug. On the other side of the fireplace, bins, toys, and other miscellaneous items are stacked.
“Storage is definitely a problem here. It would likely cost a fortune to mount the TV, which is why they didn’t, and this living room is way too small for all this furniture- it likely won’t fit our furniture either.” And so, you leave. Onto the next property.
You never noticed that sitting on that front porch would give you a beautiful view of the sunset every evening, or the beautiful crown molding, or the 10 foot ceiling in the dining room, or the beautiful stone fireplace, or the view into the backyard from the living room. You also never got to see the large primary suite with enough room for a sitting area, or the actual office that was being used as a playroom.
This is the experience for home buyers across the country at many open houses every week. Home staging is the decluttering, rearranging, and ‘fixing’ you do to prevent that. It is the pressure washing of the front porch, the repainting of the neon orange to a warm neutral, putting all of that fine china in bins tucked away in the attic or garage, and moving the living room furniture so that the eye is drawn the beautiful fireplace- not the flat screen TV where the kids watch cartoons.
Home staging is prepping and setting up your home in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily live, that will maximize the potential for the buyer. Home staging comes as 2 types of services, vacant or occupied. Occupied home staging is when we come into the home you’re still living in and consult you on how to use what you have to make it market-ready. Vacant home staging is when we bring our inventory into your empty home that you have already moved out of, to give the home buyers a real sense of what living there feels like.
So what is the point? Why have your home staged? Staged homes sell 88% faster and for 20% more, on average, according to Realtor.com. That’s why our primary goal is to get homes on and off of the market in the shortest amount of time and for the highest possible profit.
Interested in having your home staged? Contact us today for a quote!
Be on the lookout as we share more information on the difference between vacant and occupied home staging!
