How "Staging" a House can Pay Off for Sellers!

Home Staging for Real Estate Sales - Part 1: Preparation

It's about a lot more than just lighting candles..

By Antoinette Conetta

A featured article in our WeBLOG

Antoinette Conetta is a licensed Real Estate Associate Broker and a trained and experienced Interior Decorator, affilated with the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). "Staging", as decribed in this article, is a complimentary and key component of our listing service. Antoinette offers her Home Staging for Real Estate Sales service to any homeowner located on Long Island, Queens and Manhattan, New York City. For details about her Home Staging service, visit Conetta Designs at www.Conetta.com.

Selling Real Estate is a complex process that involves strong emotions for both seller and buyer. Sellers usually excessively love their home and want top dollar for every bit of it; and buyers want to find a home that they can love, while paying the very least.

Most home sellers do not have a marketing background and therefore are usually unable to view, prepare and present their home appropriately, to maximize the value and benefits that are meaningful to prospective buyers. Even where a seller has some marketing awareness, either from their own background or with the guidance of a realtor, they both may often lack a basic decorating sense. Moreover, sellers usually have an inability to sufficiently distance themselves from the emotions they have for the home that they own, love and have lived in (with all those wonderful memories). Add to this the fact that they may have already moved outside of the area - or to their new home - and you have the potential for an overwhelming and less than optimal sales situation. This can all result in selling the property for less (or not at all) simply because it does not show well.

So to summarize, sellers are usually unable to correctly visualize and present their home for the buyer who will pay the highest price. In turn, very capable buyers pass-up the property or become discouraged when they see it - unable to find the emotional linkage that is necessary for them to make an offer - and this is oftentimes simply because of basic things having to do with appearance. The final result is that sellers become frustrated with waiting, only to sell later for much less.

Staging a home is about presenting it optimally and optimistically for the eyes of a specific target buyer. It involves numerous techniques, including at the most basic level, cleaning and organizing cabinets and closets (de-cluttering) to rearranging furniture, creating effective lighting, dressing windows, eliminating odors and much more. The first step is to have some idea about the profile of your likely buyer and their needs, and then to understand that they can be distracted by just about anything - which will impact what if anything they are willing to pay for your home. The simple aim, during the sales process, is to minimize distractions and optimize benefits that are meaningful to the buyer. The house must speak for itself - room by room, obviously, collectively and subconsciously to the buyer's wants and needs.

As one specialized part of my decorating business, found at www.Conetta.com, I offer a basic Home Staging service on Long Island to any home seller, where I will come into the home, perform a careful survey, with photographs and measurements, and return with a detailed write-up (about 15 pages long) called the Home Staging Report. In this report, I introduce concepts of home staging, from a marketing perspective (based upon both my real estate sales and decorating experience) and make specific recommendations, using task lists and professional floor plans to help describe and visualize what needs to be done. In that report, I outline the very basic steps to effectively prepare a home as follows:

1. Finishing
2. Cleaning & Organizing
3. Decorating

By no means are these the only steps involved with home staging, and the work involved with each step listed here is completely driven by assumptions about who the likely buyer is (the Buyer Profile). But these are the steps that usually involve the most physical labor, so I thought it would be helpful to share some of my basically thinking with you, in a general way that would be applicable to almost any home.

Finishing
Here we are talking about things like paint, molding, outlet covers, door knobs, etc. Oftentimes - and it happens in our home as well - the finishing touches are left for sometime in the future -- sometimes way in the future. That might be ok when you are living in a home, but not when you are selling it. Everything must be finished, otherwise buyers will charge you roughly 4 dollars for every dollar it would cost you to do the work yourself. So for example, if having the newly sheetrocked bedroom painted would cost you $100, buyers (if they are even willing to do so), will mentally charge you $400 for the same work. It could be very expensive not to finish the work. And I don't mean you need to go crazy with finishing. Lots of sellers think that buyers will appreciate the fancy new door knobs, imported from Australia. That is definitely not true. We simply need to get the home projects finished at a very basic level.

Cleaning & Organizing
One of the most important things, almost any realtor will tell you, is that the house must be clean. The bathrooms must be spotless and the windows must sparkle. No crumbs on the kitchen table and no dust balls on the hardwood floors. The toys must be put away and yes, we must at least be able to walk through the garage. In terms of organizing, I'm talking here about decluttering. Cabinets and closets must be 1/3 empty. A fully packed cabinet or closet - no matter how large it really is - will look small. Conversely, a small cabinet or closet that is 1/3 empty will look roomy.

Decorating
This one is a bit tricky, because it involves personal preferences and taste. Everyone has some decorating sense, but what we need when we are selling a home is nice traditional neutrality. No loud wild colors. No pink light bulbs. No huge tropical plants in already crowded rooms. And yes, that printed rug, with the huge tiger on it -- it's got to go. Pick up any popular decorating magazine, or better yet, visit a nice furniture store for some pointers. We want to create rooms that are not over crowded, that are as brightly lit as possible and somewhat impersonal. Most people have tons of photographs throughout their home. Again, sorry, but we need to put most of them away. You can leave one or two photographs out per room. There are reasons for this, that go beyond the scope of this article, so you will need to trust me on this.

In closing, try to remove yourself from the emotions you have for your home. You will always have your beautiful memories and nobody wants to take them away from you. The fact is, the sooner you start to think of your current home as simply a product that needs to be sold, the better you will do at making it look perfect for the buyer who wants to make it their home.

In future articles, I will continue to expand upon these Home Staging concepts.

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