Hello.
Home Staging is professional preparation of real estate for sale. An entire science in the sweet spot between consumer psychology, interior design and mastery of the realtor art is dedicated to this. The goal of staging is to sell your real estate, maximizing speed of the sale and the price, with minimal amount of time, money and effort spent.
For starters, here are some statistics. In 2012, RESA (Real Estate Staging Association) inspected 89 houses which, on average, lasted 166 days on the market, until the owners despaired and called a professional home stager. These houses were sold, on average, 32 days after they were professionally prepared – that’s 81{d4f7c08805e41e9b9974dfba619ed7230ec2da6e442055d48085a7994e8adaef} less time on the market!!!
9 of them were sold with multiple offers pending.
Can you guess why?
Maurice’s firm’s inspection revealed almost 60{d4f7c08805e41e9b9974dfba619ed7230ec2da6e442055d48085a7994e8adaef} of buyers make their decision having only considered 10 homes. A correctly presented home makes the list to check out, thereby increasing its chances of sales. The same inspection claims that almost 80{d4f7c08805e41e9b9974dfba619ed7230ec2da6e442055d48085a7994e8adaef} of people are ready to pay more for a home where they can just move in without doing anything. The so-called move-in-ready house. A professional home stager will help you attain this, too.
So then, what is the mystery of this beast called home staging?
The need often comes up to sell your house or apartment, where you had created the interior comfortable for you and your loved ones. This interior may be cozy and of top quality, but, for one reason or another, potential buyers don’t feel the urge to snatch up the offer.
I always tell my clients that a house where you live and a house which you sell are two separate houses. Throughout my whole career, only once did I encounter a house which could be put up on the market without changing a thing. The woman who lived there was an artist and interior designer without sentiment towards objects (read: passion to piling mounds of useless things which clutter my and your homes alike).
In all other cases, the houses needed to be adjusted to a standard, ideal house or apartment for the standard buyer in the region where it’s being sold. Naturally, it’s necessary to consider the specifics of the region. Home staging for a downtown condominium will differ greatly for home staging in one area, which, in its turn, will differ from another area.
But there are also common rules for any region, so let me start with those.
So, the first and key rule is to unclutter.
Sale of a house and the following move is a great reason to go through everything that has piled up and either throw away, donate or gift the things you’d been keeping “just in case”. If the year hadn’t presented such a case thus far, then it’s likely that you don’t actually need the item.
If it’s hard to part with acquired items anyway, then pack them into boxes and put them in storage, if you have space). If not, then it would be reasonable to rent a storage space for the time being that you’re selling.
It’s cheap and extremely effective. A home with fewer items looks more spacious, the space makes it easier to breathe freely, and so, naturally, a potential buyer is more likely to appreciate it.
Second task: maximum depersonalization. Popular opinion states that this just consists of taking family photos off walls. However, this is just the first step. Each family has its own formula and habits. And these shouldn’t be noticed by strangers.
Of course, light and colour accents also play an important role, but more on those in later issues.
