Home staging will give you a measurable advantage over the competition. By reducing the amount of time you are on the market and raising sales prices- we can demonstrate a marketable advantage- that is, an advantage that you can actively market and sell.
Because real estate is like a race to attract the largest amount of potential buyers, you can think of home staging as analogous to the spoiler on a race car. When spoilers were first introduced, drivers and fans thought they were unnecessary. They thought spoilers spoiled the look of the cars, which is not they reason they are called spoilers by the way. But soon they started to notice that at high speeds, a spoiler actually make the cars move faster by giving them better traction from downward pressure.
Staging is like this. It gives your seller more traction with buyers through a seemingly superficial add-on. And like spoilers, they work best when the property is already performing well.
Home Staging is More Than Just Decoration
Ask yourself, why do clothing retailers showcase their wares on mannequins, and why are menu items at some restaurants displayed using images? It’s because seeing a facsimile of a thing engages the mind of the buyer in a more salient way. It allows them to skip the imagination phase- which could work against you. They may imagine an empty floor-plan as hostile to their chosen method of habitation. Home staging offers “proof” that ‘yes, after all, this room does work well when fully furnished.’
A National Association of Realtors survey showed that 40% of sellers home staging had a positive effect on the buyer’s perception of the home- and that it made selling the home easier. Eighty-three percent said they believed staging made it easier for the buyer to perceive the property as a future home. They found that staging home raised the dollar value of the sale and that the living room was most important room to furnish and stage. Twenty-five percent of brokerage agent reports showed that staging raised the sale value by between 1 and 5%.
Staging the Buyer’s Perception
Human beings are not rational. They are emotional. They rationalize their desires and their intentions using logic and reason. Yes, most of us like to think we base everything we do on facts, figures, and evidence. But by and large, we put the emotional cart before the logical horse. Buying a home is a heavily emotional process. Home is, after all, where the heart is.
If you think about it, that is rational- because why the hell would you want to live in a place where your heart is not on board? It’s madness. That is why staging matters- and why it works.
That National Association of Realtors survey shows that 10% of buyers said homes should look the way they do in the listing or advertisement. Forty percent of buyers said they brought their families with them when they looked at homes, and that they consulted their family members before buying.
Including family amplifies the positive effect of staging. This is because the buyer is thinking with the group, rather than thinking as an individual. An individual is always more rational then a group- making staging more effective on groups.
The survey said that buyers expected to see around ten homes on average, and that the more they viewed, the more positive the effects of staging became.
Sell Faster by Staging for Families
The lesson we can take from this is that you should be staging all of the homes you list, and invite buyers to view them with their families. Make an event of it- like an open house. You are stimulating the nesting instinct of the buyers. You’re helping them to perceive a house as a home- and frankly- that’s the best seller-agent job description there is! And it’s your job as the broker to facilitate this.
At Intext Staging, that’s the idea we keep in mind with every home we stage- make this place a home. At the end of the day, it’s just good sense.
