Home Staging – Part 1 Introduction

      With the advance of technology, nowadays you can market your home for sale on thousands of websites once your real estate agent input your property information into the database of local multiple listing services. Eventually, the factors affecting how fast a home gets sold and how much it gets sold come down to pricing and staging. A home priced above its market value scares away potential buyers and a home not ready for the market turns off potential buyers.

      The thing is that there is no such thing as a perfect house. Everyone has his or her unique taste and preference for a dream home. Even if you hire an architect to build a custom home, your taste and preference still change as time goes by. When a buyer walks into a house not ready for the market, its drawbacks can be easily magnified from the point of view of the potential buyer. Home buyers can no longer recognize the house’s merits. I have had home showing experiences when I found that the sellers missed my buyers because of small, easy to change imperfections in the listed house. The tenants left with all blinds down making it dark inside; the house looks clean but there is animal smell; the home looks small because there is too much furniture in it. Many Times, these drawbacks are not the essential reason my buyers walked away. However, they somehow lead to the strong awareness to the houses’ other major drawbacks.

      The purposes of home staging are to make things pleasing to the potential buyers’ eyes, and bring out the merits while minimize the drawbacks of the house. The end result is that potential buyers would be able to see themselves living in the home and the drawbacks of the home become unimportant to potential buyers. Let’s take a real life example as an analogy. When you go to an important job interview, would you not be prepared or not get dressed in a nice clean suit? If you would prepare yourself for a potential job offer, why not prepare your home for the potential buyers?       

 

      According to the statistics data from StagedHomes.com (data retrieved on July 20^th, 2013), 95% of staged homes sell for 17% more and eight times faster than non-staged homes. Regardless of the statistics, you can not deny that a staged room does look more appealing than a non-staged room and buyers are more willing to offer on a staged home. Figure 2 and Figure 3 compare a kid’s bedroom before and after staged. It is not difficult to tell which room would be more appealing to potential buyers.
 

Figure 2 A child’s room before staged. 

 

Figure 3 A child’s room after staged

 

      A staged home creates a higher perceived value. Home staging involves issues different home decoration. In later articles of this series, I will talk about some basic principals in home staging and Feng Shui based decoration ideas to help sellers stage their home before putting it on the market for sale.