Benefits of Staging Your Home Before it Hits the Market

A lot of times we decorate and furnish our houses for our own comfort and convenience, how we use spaces. As the homeowner, you know the best angle for television watching or you've got a twin bed that will only fit in a room a certain way to accommodate your children's toys. There are lots of reasons why people furnish their homes the way they do for optimal living. But when it comes to marketing, there is a difference between living and listing. Buyers who are looking for properties browse until they see something that catches their eye, so when you're preparing a property for market, staging is key. How you use spaces, how spaces are defined, color pops, architectural styles are enhanced with staging. All of those efforts go to enhancing the marketing appeal of a property. We can create a flavor of a house just with those kinds of things.

There's a visceral response that somebody has when they're looking at houses and when something catches their eye. So our job is to take a property and look at it and say, what are the most attractive elements. Are there any crosses to bear? Are there any challenges that we need to address? Also, we think about what angles we need to photograph it from. Our job is to create all these layers between the staging and the photography and how we capture and represent a property in its best light. Creating those spaces that are attractive and that make people want to linger is a big part of what staging can do.

We spend a fair amount of time creating a staging plan for our clients. What spaces are we going to focus on what needs to be done? Do we have the inventory in stock? Occasionally, we have trusted vendors that we bring in, whether it's large-scale furnishings or specialized items that we don't keep in stock, to help us along the way. Together with the homeowner, we will create a staging plan that works best. Sometimes we talk about removing an item, and if that's the case, we have the homeowner do that before we arrive. The process of our clients removing some personal articles, doing some closet clean-out, is level one. Level two is when we deliver accessories, artwork, and small furnishings, and then our team will begin physically staging. Staging generally entails moving around key foundational items, sofas, chairs, rugs and things the homeowner might already have. It’s always exciting because clients often come home and say, “gosh, I would have never thought to do that!” No staging project is the same and we don't approach everyone the same. In general, most staging assignments can be completed in two days.

When staging we try to focus on the areas that get the most attention, the spaces that buyers will be spending most of their time. A “great room” is an overused term, but really that's where everybody lives, right? The kitchen is also a well-used living space. If you look through decor magazines and if you watch HGTV, you’ll notice that they focus on those spaces the most. So bringing in staging items or giving some cohesiveness to especially to those spaces helps when photographing them, and making them feel integrated. Another area that's desirable is outdoor living spaces. A great outdoor space may need to be accessorized, sometimes all the space needs is a big umbrella or some colorful pillows. Every once in a while, the client needs some big pieces. An unfurnished room or an under-furnished room, a critical living space that needs a new sofa or something like that, we don't keep those things in inventory, so we do have suppliers that we can go to for those kinds of items. Normally there are some costs associated with it and we just tackle each of those conversations as they might need with every client. Occasionally, we might have a vacant property altogether. The sheer volume of what needs to be accomplished might exceed capacity or reason, so digital staging has become quite popular too. It's unique because it gives us a super wide range of styles. If we really want to stage something in a very contemporary way or we want to do a modern farmhouse, we can accomplish that with digital staging. Digital staging is a great way for us to give flair to a property with literally limitless options for design style.

Lastly, we'll move right into photography. We'll spend, a couple of hours doing all the photography and media at one time. All of the staging items remain while we are defining our marketing pieces and prepping for the market, and through the course of showings. Generally, we remove items when we're under contract and the buyer is satisfied with their option period, and we feel confident about the sale. There's a lot of great data out there demonstrating that the value of the property increases with staging. We go over that with each and every client because we're so convinced that most properties require some level of staging. Sometimes they don't need a two-day staging event, but they need some preparation because again, as we talked about, living is evident in most everyone's home. Because we're so convinced that this is an integral part of a successful sale and marketing of a property, we include that in our package. It's within our wheelhouse and something that we can tackle, we have inventory or we can easily acquire inventory to satisfy a staging solution. And that's just part of our service to our clients. Sometimes we're able to satisfy even those situations with digital work really just depends on the property.