STAGING^® IMPRESSIONS

What is Staging

Staging ® is about making a great first impression." No matter how many great elements you have in your house, people's eyes are drawn to negative features first," write Martha Webb and Sarah Parsons Zackheim in Dress Your House for Success. "Buyers are 'inspecting' - looking for clues to uncover hidden costs. Anxious to protect themselves, they seek reasons not to buy your house."

When you get ready to place a home on the market for sale, it becomes a product, and just like any product on the shelves at your local store it has features and benefits, pluses and minuses and there are other products for it to compete with.  Staging helps put your house in the best ‘showcase’ condition.

• Preparing the rooms - You don’t want distracted buyers, you want them to ‘mentally move-in’ and envision themselves living there.
• Decluttering - Pack up the collections, and abundance of possessions. You’re moving anyway!
• Depersonalizing – OK, your kids are adorable! But, do you really want the buyer to look at all of your photos and NOT your house.
• Neutralizing – The turquoise wall in the kitchen is great for living, but remember, you want to appeal to the widest range of buyers. Go neutral.
• Clean-Up
• Curb Appeal – It has to look good from the street, to get the buyers ‘In’ the house.
• Rearranging furniture & accessories

Benefits of Staging

Take advantage of these benefits:

• Staged^® Homes look better than competing homes for sale.
• Staged^® Homes sell faster.
• Staged^® Homes sell for more money in most markets.
• Buyer and building inspectors view Staged^® Homes as homes that have been well taken care of.
• Appraisers are more likely to appraise Staged^® Homes at full value.

Whille statistics are hard to come by, Joy Valentine, a Los Altos, Calif., real estate broker, may have compiled the only statistics studying house Staging ® .

In 1999 and then again in 2002, she surveyed about 3,000 homes in all price ranges. Both times her analysis found, on average a Staged® home sold in about half the time as its non-staged counterpart.

In addition, she found in both surveys the Staged® homes brought more money, often tens of thousands of dollars more than those not Staged®.

View my gallery of Staging ^® examples, Photo Gallery Examples.

To learn more information about Staging ^® visit www.stagedhomes.com.

A volunteer effort at the Ronald McDonald House World Wide Staging Day photos