Staging - It Works!

For about two years now, I've been an Accredited Staging Professional Realtor. Staging plays an important role in how I help my listing clients sell their properties quickly, but for some reason I have never blogged about the topic here.

Recently, I had a couple of great opportunities to prove to myself how effective staging is, as far as reducing time on market and attracting top-dollar offers. One listing was a home that had marketed previously without staging, the other listing was my own personal home. I'm not going to get into what we did on our personal home in this post, but will at some point in the future.

The listing I want to talk about was a wonderful home in a nice neighborhood that had been listed and failed to sell. Clients contacted me to find out what my suggestions were. When it had been listed originally, it was sort of oddly furnished and mostly filled with kids' toys, so buyers were having a hard time understanding how to use the spaces of the home. It was in a neighborhood which usually attracts buyers who have sort of upscale aspirations.

It seemed to me the lack of furniture and the confusing use of the rooms was putting buyers off from making an offer, so we determined that we would address these issues.

To do so, we gave the home a thorough cleaning and did some patching of interior paint. Then, we brought in furniture to show how the rooms could be used, and also to attract our "aspirational" buyers. We did some simple decorations using items that I and the seller already owned to make the home as appealing as possible.

When we returned the listing to the market, we received a full price offer in less than 6 days. This was a great result since typically in this neighborhood, it takes upwards of a month to get an offer and the house was listed at the highest per-square-foot price ever in its neighborhood.

Here are some before and after shots.




Here is a "before" shot of the dining room of this home, taken from the stairwell. You can see from this picture that it was not entirely clear what the space should be used for. It was also not a great picture to put on the Multiple Listing Service, because of the way the banister of the stairwell cuts off the bottom of the shot. It makes the room appear oddly shaped.









Here is an after shot of the dining room, showing the furniture and accessories we brought in to show off the use of the space. The professional photography also made a difference because we were able to get an angle on the room that shows how it flows to the rest of the house, and the lighting is better. Brown and neutral tones along with place settings and exotic flowers give the room a warm, modern feel.

Here is a "before" shot of the living room, before staging. You can see that although it appears neat and clean, there are children's toys and no real furniture in the space. The photograph doesn't provide any real feel for the dimensions of the room either.

This is a shot of the living room, after staging. It's a different angle on the room than the before shot, but you can see that we brought in furniture and arranged it to illustrate how the space could be used as a living room. We also took care to take the photograph in a way that illustrated the great open floor plan of the home, and provided an appearance of spaciousness for the MLS listing.