When selling a home, a few things are essential to your success.
The two most critical are working with a successful real estate professional and pricing your home correctly. After that, several factors will influence your success as a home seller.
One of them is ensuring your home is in excellent condition and shows well.
Others will emphasize that professional photography is vital. As a thirty-seven-year real estate veteran, I can attest that these things are crucial to home sales.
We will talk about the importance of staging a home for sale. Staging can prove invaluable if you want to realize maximum value from your property.
Let’s dig into everything you need to know about staging a home.
What is Home Staging?
In a nutshell, staging entails planning and preparation for potential purchasers. It encompasses redecorating the house, rearranging furniture, and clearing away any clutter that could detract from its beauty to present it optimally.
The goal is to create a welcoming environment that will entice potential buyers. Home staging can be considered a presentation method to make the property more attractive to potential home buyers.
Professional home stagers will employ innovative decorating strategies and high-quality finishing touches such as furniture and decor.
What Are The Benefits of Staging a Home?
Home staging can be immensely beneficial, providing a fresh perspective for potential buyers. Clearing away extraneous belongings and clutter makes the space more inviting and accessible.
Potential buyers will be able to see themselves living in the home easier. It’s like having a blank canvas without personal photographs or other belongings that might impede a buyer’s comprehension of living there.
Studies conducted by the National Association of REALTORS (NAR) suggest that over seventy-five percent of potential buyers find it easier to envision a staged property as their ideal home.
Staging also makes a home appear more ready for occupancy, thus providing an enhanced impression that less work is needed. Most home buyers today are interested in turnkey properties.
Staging a home is an invaluable strategy that makes marketing it easier. Photos of its interior are more striking for viewers looking online at the best home shopping sites. Additionally, all the marketing material left in the home will look much better.
With the extra effort, staged homes for sale typically will sell faster. It has been reported that over 60 percent of real estate agents feel that staging a home has impacted the time needed to sell.
Staging a Home Can Be Done By an Owner or a Real Estate Agent
In most industries, professionals are the best avenue for completing any job. The same holds in home staging. A professional is undoubtedly going to do a better job than a layperson.
The question is whether it’s worth it. I am sure many professional stagers will be pissed off hearing me say this, but home staging costs are high.
In most circumstances, an owner, with help from a real estate agent, can get a home prepared for sale without the added expense.
Staging a home for sale can be free when you have a skilled real estate agent in your corner. Let’s face it, making your home look fantastic isn’t rocket science. Home staging companies do an excellent job, but will the added expense put more money in your pocket? Probably not.
How to Stage Your Home For Sale Without a Professional Stager
Staging a home for sale will include several things. The first will be getting rid of any unnecessary clutter. There are several ways to go about doing it.
From experience, I would recommend getting rid of all the excess junk in your home first. Start by gathering everything you don’t need or want and put it into piles.
It makes the most sense to separate things inside and out. After everything has been put into piles, call one of the best junk removal companies.
One of my personal favorites is 1-800-Got-Junk. I have used them many times throughout my career.
Donate to Charity When Staging a Home
Once all the junk is out of the house, your next step is removing items that have value, but you don’t want. There are a few ways to go about getting rid of extraneous items. You could have a yard sale, but a better method is to donate to charity.
Many charitable organizations will pick up donations at your home. It will help stage your home, and you’ll be helping some folks in need.
Some companies specialize in taking furniture from your home. So you can donate your furniture by getting in touch with one of these charities.
Call in a Handy Man as Part of the Home Staging Process
Are there some minor items around the home that need addressing? Maybe you have a few rooms that need painting? If they stand out like a sore thumb because they have outdated wallpaper or an ungodly color, it makes sense to neutralize these areas.
When there are other minor fixes needed, take care of them. Anything blatantly obvious should be addressed.
Get Your Home Professionally Cleaned
One of the final steps in the home staging process will be cleaning it professionally. Have someone come in and clean your house from top to bottom. If your carpets need professional cleaning, tackle that as well.
Final Touches in Staging a Home
The final touches of staging a house should include clearing your kitchen counters entirely. The same should be done to your baths. These are two of the most vital areas of your home. They need to look their absolute best.
What is The Cost of Home Staging?
One of the questions that sellers often ask is how much home staging costs. A home staging job can vary tremendously in price. It depends on what you’re going to ask the stager to do. Home sellers usually pay slightly under $1000 to $3000 in home staging costs.
Most stagers charge for an hour-long meeting during an initial home staging consultation, ranging from $150 to $600.
Although the actual costs associated with staging vary, they are often influenced by a multitude of factors, such as the size and price of your home; the extent to which you require services like furniture placement or decoration; and if any other items are in addition to what’s already been provided.
For more extensive staging jobs, paying between one to three percent of your property’s list price would not be uncommon.
A home staging job where you ask for advice on what to do will be much less than a staging job where the stager removes furniture and brings in their own.
When your house is in decent shape, and your furniture looks appealing, you might only need to pay to rearrange and declutter the space. The average home staging cost for this is around $800.
What is Virtually Staging a Home?
Virtual staging is not the same as traditional house staging.
Virtual home staging is when a graphic artist expertly creates an elaborate room arrangement utilizing virtual decorating. Furniture and other home decor items will be placed in photos to make it look like it exists on the property.
It results in a pleasurable image of the rooms in a room. Some real estate agents will use virtual staging to enhance the homes they are marketing, especially when properties are vacant.
The problem with virtual staging is that a home may look exceptional online, but potential buyers can be disappointed once visiting the home.
They see a pleasurable depiction of the property online but then become disappointed in person.
Home Staging Near Me
When you want to stage your home professionally, you’ll need to find an excellent stager. Finding home staging companies shouldn’t be that challenging. One of the best ways is to ask your real estate agent for a recommendation.
Even if a Realtor does not regularly use a stager, they probably will be able to recommend someone. If you’re not working with a real estate agent, the best way to find a home stager will be using Google.
You can search for home staging near me or home staging companies near me. There should be plenty of results to choose from.
When you’re staging a home for sale, it will still be necessary to do some vetting of who you choose. Make sure you get some recommendations from past customers. Look at the stager’s reviews to ensure that most of them are positive.
A professional stager will have home staging certification completed.
Will Professional Staging Sell My Home?
Does home staging work? Will home staging sell my house? These are questions that homeowners ask themselves all the time.
Professional staging does not sell a home! There I said it. I am sure this will put a lot of home stager’s panties in a bunch. Let’s clarify – I am not saying home staging does not have a place in real estate sales; it is just nowhere near the most crucial aspect.
Does staging sell a home? No – not if other more critical marketing activities are missed!
Over the last few years, I have noticed some homeowners who have fallen in love with an agent who promises home staging as part of their service package and has forgotten about the essential things that sell a home.
When trying to sell your property, it only makes sense to do everything you can to fetch a great price.
Rarely does anyone want to sell a home, hoping for less than the most money possible, except maybe those selling their home as-is or looking for a real estate investor to purchase it.
As possibly your biggest asset, you want a buyer to choose your home and pay the maximum price the market will bear.
Unfortunately, this desire to sell can sometimes lead to a wasted effort – trying out reputed things to be the end all be all in the sale but do little to move your home if you make mistakes elsewhere.
Professionally Staging a Home Won’t Help When You Do Other Things Wrong
One selling practice that has gained popularity over the past decade is home staging. Sellers and real estate agents have started looking towards professional home stagers – people who will come into your home and spruce it up with furniture and other decor items to make it more appealing to buyers.
However, according to a recent study in the Journal of Real Estate Research, the reliance on home staging to fetch top dollar may be misguided.
While home staging may improve a home’s look, evidence suggests that it is not the ultimate weapon in selling that many thought it to be. This is not to say that your home should not be in the best possible showing shape.
Far from it. Houses that look their best sell quicker and usually for more money than those that don’t. Don’t be fooled into thinking you need professional staging, especially if your home already looks promising.
In other words, if you have something that looks similar to Archie Bunkers chair in your family room but the rest of your home looks spotless, don’t feel like you need a professional home stager to come in with some chic toss pillows and a shiny coffee table with an expense vase.
In my thirty-seven years in the business, adding decor and fancy furniture has never been essential to selling homes!
Putting Your Best Foot Forward When Selling a House
On the surface, the reliance on staging makes sense. If you had the choice between two similar homes, where one looked immaculate and perfectly decorated, and the other was dirty and filled with random pieces of furniture, you would naturally choose the house that looked better.
We are told early on to put our best foot forward, especially when we want to appeal to someone else. You clean your car before you try to sell it.
You dress up for interviews when you want a job. It only makes sense to spruce up your home for potential buyers. The problem comes when you have unreasonable expectations of staging. Home staging is no substitute for the hard work of selling a home.
Hiring the right Realtor, setting the right price, and marketing the home effectively are far more critical in getting a house sold than decor.
It would help if you did everything right when you wanted to sell your home quickly and reasonably. Staging can be a helpful addition to this process, but it is no substitute for all the most critical steps to a home sale.
Don’t be brainwashed into thinking that choosing a Realtor that provides home staging vs. one that does not is how you should base your decision when selling a home!
The Evidence Professional Staging Does Not Work
Researchers were interested in determining how much home staging impacted the sale process.
The study, titled “The Impact of Staging Conditions on Residential Real Estate Demand,” involved creating a virtual home tour with six different variations and testing it with a national sample.
Some virtual homes included one with good furnishings and a neutral wall color, a home with an unattractive wall color and excellent furnishings, and a house with neutral wall colors and no furnishings.
The final results indicated that people were willing to pay nearly the same price for any of the houses. The staging did not generate higher offers.
This was only a virtual study and did not mean that home staging has any place in selling your home. However, it does indicate that relying on staging to lead to higher offers or more offers on your home is probably not the best strategy.
You will need to do much more to sell your house in a buyer’s housing market.
I am not basing my opinion on professional home staging because of a virtual study. That would be foolish because nothing beats real-life experiences.
Relying on something in a fake controlled environment is not the way to examine reality. That would be like saying your emotional reaction to seeing an alien on television would be the same as in real life.
We can agree you won’t need a change of underwear from seeing an alien on television. Seeing a real one in person with a ray gun pointed at you would be a different story. Right?
First Things First – Pick The Best Realtor
To sell your home, you must first focus on the most important things.
The essentials in selling a home begin with choosing the right Realtor. You want an individual with a proven track record of success who can give advice specific to selling your home in your market.
With a great Realtor, you will have a teammate willing to do the heavy lifting required to sell a home.
You will also have genuine feedback and advice from someone who knows what he or she is talking about.
Hiring the best real estate agent should prevent you from doing anything that would get in the way of selling your house, such as pricing it too high or performing renovations that can negatively impact your home’s marketability.
A good Realtor can demonstrate that they know how to sell houses. This person will have recent sales and current clients who are satisfied and willing to discuss it with you.
A Realtor does not necessarily have to have 20 years in the business. They need to have a proven ability to move houses with consistency.
The track record should include a high sale ratio to the number of properties they take on and consistently selling homes for close to the original listing price.
Home Staging Won’t Help An Overpriced Home For Sale
The concept of correct pricing is a vital one. Pricing the home too high will repel potential buyers, potentially creating a domino effect that can leave your home on the market for months, if not years.
A good agent will know how to price your home to sell. This is why looking at the variation in what the Realtor initially lists their homes for and what they sell at is essential.
You want someone who is a good judge of what a house will go for from the beginning. Don’t be fooled by the agent trying to “buy your listing” by telling you what you want to hear.
Stay realistic and look at the market data through the eyes of a buyer. It would be best if you tried to avoid agents that seem too focused on staging your home – especially at the expense of other, more critical work.
If the best thing you have heard from an agent is how they will stage your home for you, don’t second guess yourself. The “fluff” is not what you want to focus on when selecting a Realtor to sell your home. Your energy should be concentrated elsewhere.
Staging is a great way to accent your house, like a cherry on top of a sundae. Any agent that insists otherwise should probably be avoided.
You can have immaculate staging, but if your agent fails to market your home effectively or price it according to what the market will accept, staging will not help to fix these underlying problems.
Staging does not work when everything else is wrong!
Don’t Let Home Staging Cloud Your Judgment.
It would be hard for even the most ardent home stager to disagree that the most fabulous-looking house in the world will not sell if it is overpriced, being marketed poorly, or a combination of the two.
A few years ago, while selling real estate in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, I was interviewed by a home seller. They interviewed a few other local Realtors too.
I didn’t win the listing and was very disappointed, especially after seeing who the seller chose to represent them.
Out of curiosity and the need to understand how I could improve my presentation, I called and asked the seller what the basis was for their selection.
The seller told me the agent offered to stage the property for them.
As a backdrop to this story, let me say that this particular home was in great shape and did not need any home staging.
The seller had tasteful furniture and paint selections, and there was barely any clutter. With my guidance, it would have taken the seller under an hour to go through the home and get it in tip-top showing shape.
The Real Estate Agent is More Vital Than Home Staging
To be kind, the seller’s Realtor did hardly any real estate marketing. Certainly nothing creative. You could not find their website for any local real estate searches.
The photography and descriptions of the property were average at best. There was nothing the agent did that made this home stand out whatsoever.
This particular Realtor relied on the 3 P’s of marketing – put a sign in the yard, put it in MLS, and pray. In this specific case, the agent’s prayers were not answered.
As a Realtor, losing out to another agent is never easy, especially when you know you have superior skills. I knew all was not lost because the agent had utterly overpriced the home to the point where it would take more than a few reductions to get it to sell.
I knew there was a chance I would be speaking to this seller again. Sure enough, that is precisely what happened. The house didn’t sell, and the owner called me four months later to get the job done.
The home sold within a few weeks after I took over the listing. I should also emphasize that the stager took their “things” with them when the other Realtor was relieved of duty.
The seller, in this case, threw the baby out with the bathwater. The Realtors blinded them by offering to stage the home and forgot what is necessary to sell a home.
What Matters More Than Staging a Home For Sale
Folks, staging does not sell a home! Staging is a tool that can enhance everything thing else you do. It is the icing on the cake. What matters most in successfully selling a home?
After thirty-seven years in the business, that is an easy question to answer. Here is what matters most:
- The right price for the property – must be based on comparative market data, not an agent who tells you they think they can sell it for X, with X being pulled out of a hat.
- The right real estate agent selection – if you think all Real Estate agents do the same things to sell homes, you are misguided. Like any other industry, some agents have a much better skill set and know what it takes to get the job done.
- Proper marketing – doing an exceptional job at marketing is crucial in real estate. In real estate, it is usually pretty easy to see who is doing a standout job.
- The proper condition – you want your home to show well. It should be clean and well-kept. Does it need to have leather furniture, a grand piano, the London Symphony Orchestra playing in the background, the fresh smell of pumpkin pie, and every shred of evidence a family lives in your home put into a box in your closet – NO! NO! NO!
Summary of Tips For Staging a Home
- Declutter your home
- Hire a junk removal company
- Donate to charities
- Get a deep cleaning top to bottom
- Depersonalize your house
- Define your rooms
- Remove wallpaper and paint
- Make minor improvements
- Clean carpets and other floors
- Clear all counters
- Make sure the exterior is presentable
Final Thoughts on Staging a House
The bottom line is a well-presented home will matter to sell quickly for the most money. However, thousands of homes sell weekly without professional home staging.
You should not, however, discount the importance of having a great looking home. First impressions mean everything in real estate.
Please do yourself a favor and don’t pick a real estate agent because they have offered to do home staging for you. Select a Realtor based on their track record of selling homes!
Hopefully, you now understand why professional staging does not work to sell a home if you forget about the basics.
Additional Home Selling & Staging Resources
Do you think your home could use staging to enhance its appeal? Here are some excellent references to learn more about home staging.
- Staging your home for less money – see how you can get your home staged for the market inexpensively without using a home stager.
- Home selling tips that will make a difference in getting top dollar in the shortest amount of time.
- The creator of staging a home, Barb Schwartz, gives her best home staging tips and advice at Staged Homes.
Does staging help sell a home? Sure it will help but not if you overprice your property or choose a terrible real estate agent.
About the author: The above Real Estate information on staging a home was provided by Bill Gassett, a Nationally recognized leader in his field. Bill can be reached via email at billgassett@remaxexec.com or by phone at 508-625-0191. Bill has helped people move in and out of many Metrowest towns for the last 37+ Years.
Are you thinking of selling your home? I am passionate about real estate and love sharing my marketing expertise!
I service Real Estate Sales in the following Metrowest MA towns: Ashland, Bellingham, Douglas, Framingham, Franklin, Grafton, Holliston, Hopkinton, Hopedale, Medway, Mendon, Milford, Millbury, Millville, Northborough, Northbridge, Shrewsbury, Southborough, Sutton, Wayland, Westborough, Whitinsville, Worcester, Upton, and Uxbridge MA.
