Staging Your House: An Important Real Estate Sales Tip
27 July 2006For anyone contemplating selling your home, here’s an important tip that you may not be aware of: there is an entire industry dedicated to putting fake furniture in your house and decorating it to make it more likely to sell. And it works -
It’s even become a selling point for agents prospecting for listings. If they can differentiate themselves during a sales pitch by letting sellers know that their house will be staged, the agent may win the listing.
“One seller sued the agent for not recommending the house be staged,” says Schwarz. “A nearly identical house down the street sold for $100,000 more - same size lot, same floor plan.”
This has gradually replaced the idea that the best way to sell a house is to have it shown to prospective buyers empty. It turns out people don’t have that much imagination - it’s hard for them to envision what the house is going to look like when they live in it. And having a professional come in to make the house look like a dream home can really work.
If you haven’t seen it before, there’s a TV show on A & E if you’ve got cable dedicated to this idea called Sell This House!. It’s not exactly the same thing - professional staging often involves moving all your furniture out and putting in better stuff. But it’s based around a similar premise - they go through the owner’s house, rearrange the furniture, fix anything that looks weird, add in some cheap decorations, and instantly make the house worth a lot more to prospective buyers than it would have been if the owner had just left things alone.
If you’re looking to find a stager to help you sell your house, you should check out this website. It’s the site of a professional association that accredits people in home staging, and it can give you more information about how it works and who to contact to find someone to do it. They claim that staging gets about 6-7% higher sale prices on average for a home - but the biggest benefit is in terms of time, because staged houses sell much more quickly than ones that aren’t staged.
One tip for buyers: You might be able to get a better price by deliberately avoiding staged homes. Sound weird? Not really, if you think about it - staging is a psychological tool. The other buyers who are looking at a staged house are going to be willing to bid more because it helps them envision what the house will look like when they live there. If you go to a house that isn’t staged, the seller won’t have that advantage - and other buyers won’t be bidding as much.
One Response to “Staging Your House: An Important Real Estate Sales Tip”
August 8th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
[...] Home Staging By PHD I was catching up on the previous week of posts from the Carnival of Real Estate when I came across a very helpful post about home staging from Free the Drones. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, home stagers help houses sell faster, for more money. [...]