If you're currently trying to sell a home or are thinking about doing so in the near future, you have probably heard of the practice of staging. This professional service for dressing up your home for pictures and viewings is most often thought of as a pure issue of presentation.
Sure, the right furniture arranged elegantly makes your house look more like a magazine and creates more dynamic pictures for your listing, but there are actually more subtle technical reasons to the home staging process as well. It's not just about appearances - staging makes it easier on several levels for buyers to imagine themselves living in a home they're investigating or touring!
Here are five of the less obvious reasons why staging your home makes the home selling process easier by increasing home sale prices and speeding up closings across the board.
1) Home Staging Shows the Realistic Room Dimensions
When you're taking a tour of online home sale images, one thing you may notice is that it is radically more difficult to tell how big empty rooms are or how much of your furniture they will be able to hold. In fact, it's often challenging to tell much difference between large spacious rooms and smaller bedrooms!
Staging a home provides artfully placed furniture that gives the listing images and touring guests a much clearer idea of how big the rooms are and what uses they could be put to. This makes it easier for home buyers to visualize their own furniture in the space or imagine something new and fun they've always wanted to do with a home. Did you know home buyers stay in a vacant home an average of only 5 minutes but linger in a staged home an average of 40 minutes?
2) Staging Makes Buyers Ready to Move In Immediately
In the centuries of real estate history, it's been proven that the best way to sell a property is to make the prospective home buyers feel at home. You want them to be imagining themselves living in and enjoying the space before they even realize it, and you want them to think that this home will be perfect for the next stage of their life.
This means you want to make it welcoming and ready for them to start their new life immediately. It may seem counterintuitive, but it's true: a vacant house simply does not give the psychological impression of being ready to move in and start a life, but a staged home does!
3) Proper Staging Shows Buyers How to Use Space
Some rooms have a clear and appealing purpose like kitchens, utility rooms, and bedrooms. However, for office/sitting rooms and living/family rooms, it can often be difficult for buyers to imagine how to best use the space.
You can utilize staging to show off a great family conversation space, mark the best place to put a television, subtly divide an overly large room, or show off how extra space can be used for special purposes like a personal gym or playroom. When buyers see how the home could be used, they have an easier time imagining their own ideas to use the space and the home selling process becomes much faster.
4) Use Home Staging to Visually Update Older Homes
Of course, staging isn't all furniture and decor! Often it goes deeper, taking care of both minor repairs and visual updating. After all, the best way to sell a home is to make it look as close to new as possible. It's the Shiny Penny Theory - almost everyone picks the shiniest penny in a pile. It's not technically worth any more than the others, but it's the one that gets their attention.
Most buyers are looking for something with neutral wall tones and open living spaces. Staging is a great way to update areas that look particularly dated based on the era the home was built or last renovated in. The lifetime of a trend is about 10 years, so if your home was updated 12-15 years ago, buyers may not consider it up-to-date and move on to the next one. Homes that are refreshed with the current trends in wall color and decor are much more likely to appeal to today's home buyers and give the impression that the home is ready to move into.
5) Staging Makes Room for the Buyers
In many situations during the home selling process, the sellers are not fully moved out while they're trying to sell a home. If you're going to be staging while your own things are still in the house, it's important not to give the impression that potential buyers are intruding.This involves artfully removing most signs of occupation.
Ideally, you want the house to give the impression of being like a hotel suite waiting for someone to unpack their luggage and personalize. This means you must remove your own personality markers from the home. You don't want buyers to get distracted by trying to paint a picture of you in the house - you want them to paint a mental picture of themselves in the space! Stagers can help you identify signs of territory that you may not notice because it's been your home for so long.
Get Help From Blackburn Coastal Realty
Staging is an incredibly useful aspect of selling a home and almost every seller does it to some extent or another. If you need help staging your home to be sold or you have any other questions about the home selling process, contact us now! Blackburn Coastal Realty is your first source for selling a property on or near the Gulf Beaches of Tampa Bay.
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