Have you ever walked into a model home and thought "WOW!" The idea behind staging is to appeal to the masses. Home builder’s understand this and they do a fantastic job of appealing to the senses of home buyers. Take away all the furniture and decorative touches and you are left with empty rooms and buyer's getting back in their cars.
Staging may simply mean fine tuning a well decorated home to ensure it is meticulously maintained, uncluttered, spacious and bright. At the other extreme, staging could require painting (with a staging safe colour), re-arranging furniture or removing the existing furniture, refurnishing and accessorizing it.
Staging will significantly enhance a vacant home as well, transforming a cold, lifeless space into the warm and inviting lifestyle buyers are searching for. Using vision boards to add marketing flare is also an excellent way to stage rooms in a vacant property. Choose a few key rooms and demonstrate on the vision board the possibilities of colour, texture, furniture layout or perhaps show different uses for existing rooms.
Sometimes, a property will present special staging challenges due to customization. Your home may be perfect for you based on the lifestyle you lead, but a prospective purchaser may look at the features and amenities you consider to be fabulous and view them as undesirable if they don’t match their lifestyle. For instance, you enjoy your exercise room and wine cellar however, if the buyer prospect would prefer to have a home theatre and doesn’t drink wine they won’t equate the same value to those rooms that you do. Showing different uses for existing rooms may broaden the appeal of a property. Using vision boards, rather than redoing the rooms, the space can be illustrated and envisioned differently. The exercise room might be “redone” on the vision board as a home theatre and the vision board placed on an easel at the entrance to the room. This enables buyer prospects to envision how a home might be adapted to different lifestyles.
When it comes to staging, the bar is high. Really high. HGTV. Houzz. Pinterest. Instagram. Architectural Digest. All these outlets which constantly publish beautifully designed and decorated homes have influenced what the average Buyer expects their home to look like - and yours, for that matter. Additionally, all the do-it-yourself publications and shows along with the advent of home improvement stores which double as DIY design emporiums have given everyday people of modest means the power to live in beautiful and functional homes, without breaking the bank.
A little time, effort and money will go a long way and pay big dividends to make you the most money when selling.
- The cost of staging a property is less than the cost of your first price reduction
- 6 seconds…that’s how long it takes a home buyer to decide if they like your property.
- It is my observation that it is generally someone younger coming in to buy your home. Having a contemporary paint colour and décor goes a long way.
- Staging is MARKETING, not Interior Design.
Lori Matherson Homes