While I'm on vacation, some great bloggers are filling in for me with a few posts each day. The following is from Cindy at Staged 4 More:
Staging has become a new buzzword of the real estate industry. I often have homeowners calling me to inquire about staging, but after in-depth conversation, I realize that they often a) don’t know why they need to stage their house, they just know they should and b) have a complete misunderstanding about staging and therefore have unreasonable expectations of what goes on when a professional stager stages his/her home.
To explain staging in brief: Staging is not about decorating, it is about marketing. Think of when Nike comes out with a new pair of shoes. They package the product and make it fabulous and appeal to as many potential buyers as possible before they roll out for the mass consumers. Same with selling a home. As a home seller, once I have decided to place my home on the market, my home now becomes a listing, a real estate product that opens its doors to the general public. What staging does is to package and market the home to make it show-ready to appeal to a broad spectrum of buyers. Therefore staging helps to sell listings quicker in both hot and cold real estate markets, and potentially for more money.
So now your home is staged, now what? Just because of your home is staged, it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically attracting buyers to open houses. It still has to be marketed properly. Like great food is paired with great wine that brings out the food’s flavor and depth, same with your home. Now your home is staged, it needs to be pair with good photographs to make the home attractive. Staging has duel purposes: not only staged homes should to show well in person, staged homes should also show well on the internet. This is the online shopping age, people even buy cars over internet and it is no longer strange to buy homes off ebay. With 80% of buyers start their home purchases online, it is extremely important to pull the buyers into the open houses by having great listing photos.
One of the pitfalls that I have seen as a professional stager is that agents don’t market their listings properly by presenting the home with poor photographs: poorly lit, bad camera angle or unclear photos. If the listing photos are unattractive, it is very easy for buyers to click to the next one.
People often think that staging is a fix-it-all for all sorts of problems, especially when the home is not selling or it is overpriced. Unfortunately, in reality, that is not the case. You still need to leverage staging to your best advantage. Going back to the Nike example, it’s great now that you have got the well-designed shoes (the product), and you have packaged it well (staging), you still need a strong marketing campaign to introduce your products and appeal to the buyers. The selling process can be very complicated and there are a lot of variables that are against you in succeeding of selling your home at the price that you desire. In a competitive market like now, it is even more important to make sure everything is working to your advantage as a seller. Great staging is only part of it. It also has to work with other factors such as listing photography, proper pricing, and strong marketing that will help your listing be the shiny penny.
What do you do when a house is not photogenic on the outside, and even the best photo does not quite seem to properly capture its appearence?
Posted by: F. Morana | September 20, 2007 at 09:55 AM
Hey F
Can you elaborate?
Cheers,
Cindy
Posted by: cindy@staged4more | September 22, 2007 at 01:22 AM
I know many homebuyers who researched potential homes online before setting appointments to actually visit the homes. This is the way things are done these days. Great internet pictures that are staged attract buyers!
Posted by: Rachel - Staged Makeovers | September 28, 2007 at 02:00 PM