Even if this is your first time selling a house. You can appreciate that making it looks its best is important. If interested buyers can’t walk through the living room because the kids’ toys are all over the place. Then they might look elsewhere.
Preparing your home to be it’s most appealing to potential buyers is known as staging your home. It’s like you’re getting your home ready to be ‘on stage’; the star of the show. But home staging is a lot more than just straightening up your house, getting the carpets cleaned and maybe painting a few walls.
Interestingly, even some of the most expensive, professionally-decorated homes don’t show very well without staging. To get a better understanding of why that is. It helps to learn more about how staging actually makes your home more attractive to buyers.
While the homeowners who hired professional designers and renovators might have loved the finished décor. (we hope so, they paid for it!) buyers might not have the same reaction. The home you’ve lived in. The one you’ve made just right for you and your family will look and feel great to you. But home buyers might not appreciate the same things and that can make the home you love feel odd or unappealing to others. It’s like borrowing someone’s slippers. The ones they swear are the most comfortable ever, but you find that they just don’t fit right.
So, instead of making what you have to look its best. The job of a home stager is to make your home more appealing to potential buyers. And that means staging it so that when buyers walk into each room. They can envision what it would look like with their personal touch. Instead of seeing your personal touch.
The Benefits of Home Staging
In a nutshell, there are two big benefits to staging your home. First, it’s one of the best things you can do to attract higher offers for your home. It’s difficult to quantify just how much more any particular home will sell for if it is staged. And you’ll find varying estimates of the price increase you can expect. But to give you an idea, the National Association of Realtors conducted a study of buyers’ realtors about the effect of staging on selling price. Here are some of the results of the study:
- 52% of buyers’ realtors believe that buyers offer more for a staged home
- 32% feel that buyers offer 1% to 5% more
- 16% said they think buyers offer 6% to 10% more
- 4% said buyers will offer 20% more for a staged home
- Only 20% of buyers’ realtors felt that buyers didn’t offer more for a staged home
Just in case those numbers don’t look too impressive. Let’s look at the very lowest estimate of the impact staging has on the price of a home: a one percent increase.
Using the average price for homes of all types sold in Markham in January 2018, $873,538, if staging increased the selling price by 1%, homeowners would get an average of $8,735.38 more for their home versus what they would get if it isn’t staged. And keep in mind that the average selling price includes homes that were staged, so the actual difference might be even higher.
That’s just the first big benefit of home staging. In Part 2 of this series, not only we take a look at the second big benefit, but we’ll also begin to see how a home stager stages your how to help it sell faster and for a higher price. In the meantime, if you have any questions about selling your home in Markham, Unionville, Richmond Hill or anywhere in York Region, please give The Tar Team a call.