TO  STAGE  IS  ALL  THE  RAGE 
by Xavier Brown 

    The trend to stage homes began on the West Coast back in the 1970’s and slowly spread to the East Coast in the 80’s and 90’s going mainstream with the popularity of the staging-based TV shows such as “Sell This House!” and “Designed To Sell.” Now staging has become as important to sellers as real estate agents. 

    Similar to decorating, staging is a process where homes are imaginatively enhanced to help prospective buyers visualize themselves living in the house. Rather than expressing the unique personality and tastes of the present owners, staging creates a neutral, open, and inviting atmosphere which greatly improves the home’s salability. There are different levels of staging ranging from simple adjustments to more involved renovations. A staging professional will work with you to present your home in its best light and within your budget. For instance, staging might involve helping the seller re-decorate by re-arranging the existing home furnishings. There may be a need to select some new decorative elements and accessories, such as paint colors, flooring materials, window treatments, artwork, linens, etc. These changes and additions would be more appealing and more suitable for the particular home, while offering other suggestions with the ultimate goal of making the house more marketable. 
                        
                          You never get a second chance 
                          to make a good first impression.

    Putting aside the need to take care of any repairs and problems a home can have, typically, homes are cluttered or filled with an abundance of personal items. This clutter can distract and overwhelm the buyer and keep them from picturing themselves living in the home, resulting time and again in a lost sale. It has been said, there’s only a three-minute window of opportunity to attract a buyer. So, if the seller is serious about attracting a buyer, some preparations must be made to make the home look it’s best. On many occasions, the desire to look one’s personal best and make a good first impression is very familiar and customary to most people. And yet, very often homeowners will present their house for sale as if they’re going out on a first date wearing a worn out bathrobe, slippers, and looking, and dare I say, even smelling, as if they just got out of bed. It may be cliché, but it’s also very true with a home on the market: You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. When a home is staged properly all of the strengths of the house are highlighted and the challenges are minimized. Even the most pristine of residences will require some fine-tuning to make that all-important first impression a good one. 

     Staging a home for sale is concerned with marketing; 
                  It is not about your personal lifestyle.

    Most people don’t have imaginations. They cannot visualize themselves living in someone else’s cluttered home or even in an empty one. The staging solution presents the home as a cozy, colorful, and inviting form of merchandise. Rather than distracting the buyers with a sales pitch, the successful staging professional enthralls the buyers with a home environment they can truly and comfortably picture themselves living in. In prepping a residence for sale, your goal is to sell it and sell it for the best asking price. With staging, your home may not sell at a higher price than the market allows, but it will sell faster and very likely without having to renegotiate or lower the price to make the sale. So, which is better? Spending a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to sell your home at the original asking price or dropping the price by 10 to 20 thousand dollars or more? 

                    STAGING – A worthwhile investment.

    Very much like the preparations for that aforementioned “first date,” staging takes time, imagination, and maybe even a new outfit or makeover, realizing that what one has in the “closet” just doesn’t cut it anymore. This doesn’t mean making major renovations, or going to the expense of building an addition just to compete with some of the more impressive houses in the neighborhood. Instead, a positive impression can be created with properly placed existing furniture, decorative elements, and removal of clutter. Thus, the rooms can be made to feel larger and more inviting. So staging is a much more practical approach to accelerate a sale and receive the best possible selling price. Generally speaking, buyers are already traumatized by the amount of money they will have to spend on a new home, even for those who can easily afford one. The staging preparations will lessen the likelihood the potential buyer will have a negative experience wandering through spaces that are consistently warm and inviting to them. Internally, they experience the WOW! factor. These good impressions will linger in comparison to other homes they visit. The buyer, who makes that all-important emotional connection, becomes eager and desirous to live in that home, and more content to pay the price to own it. Staging is an easy and cost-effective way to present your home for sale in its best possible light. The choice is yours, months on the market or more money in the bank. What are you going to choose?