Home Staging: Buyer Expectations [INFOGRAPHIC]

Home staging gives you marketable advantage over the competition in the real estate market by increasing sales prices and reducing Days on the Market (DOM).

One way to envision the real estate competition is this: it’s a race among agents and sellers and the vital part of it is attracting a lot of prospective buyers. So as the real estate market continues to evolve, home staging has taken a huge role in overtaking the competition and has become a powerful tool in preparing a home for sale. It’s no longer just the house or the location by itself, but how you showcase a certain property to be more appealing to your target audience is now becoming one of the critical aspects of the competition.

Showcasing property is more than just decorating

Envision this. Which sells faster: clothes displayed on a mannequin or clothes on a hanger? Just like selling clothes, you can persuade potential buyers by setting up the home to be as eye-catching as possible. Think of it as a “bait” switch. When people see your property — online, in a flyer, or even in person, does it make them look twice, thrice, or even more?

Today, buyers are waiting to be swooned, they are waiting to be captivated. Real estate agents should be in the business of primarily catching their buyer’s attention and then allowing them to engage, connect, and visualize themselves living in the house.

So what do buyers expect throughout the home buying process?

Home buying takes months of processing from initially listing your property in the real estate market to finally closing the deal. Buyers also don’t usually say yes to the first property they see. House hunting itself is a gruesome process that many people go through.

So to help you reel in your buyers and make them bite at your offer, you should be informed about their perceptions and buying habits, here are a few statistics from the National Association of REALTORS to get you started:

• 82% of respondents said that buyers had ideas about where they wanted to live, and 74% also had ideas about what they wanted in an ideal home before starting the buying process.
• 39% of respondents stated that buyers found the home buying process to be harder compared to their expectations.
• A median of 10% of respondents cited that buyers felt homes should look the way they were staged on TV shows.
• A median of 25%t of respondents cited that buyers brought family members with them to view homes.
• 58% of respondents stated that they were not influenced to stage homes as they saw them on TV.
• 32% of respondents stated that buyers did have an expectation of the number of homes they saw. Among those who did have an expectation, buyers expected to view a median of 10 homes.
• 54% of respondents stated that buyers’ expectations of the number of homes they saw before buying matched the market.

Check out this infographic below for more stats!

What do these numbers tell us?

If there’s one thing you can infer from these statistics, it’s that buyers are very simple and straightforward with what they want. So this means there’s room for you too please them using Home Staging. All you have to do is let them visualize the home they want by eliminating the flaws and converting unused spaces into functional ones.

Most buyers are family-oriented so presenting a comfortable place and projecting a homey vibe can leave them highly satisfied. The main goal is to bring out your home’s best features while creating a favorable atmosphere where they can envision themselves actually living there.

What role can Virtual Staging play?

Buyers tend to expect things to be flawless — not totally perfect but as good as it could possibly be — and virtual staging is one way to achieve a quality staged property that highlights the best features and value of a home.

Virtual staging will also allow you to present options to your buyers that you can’t achieve through traditional staging (perhaps you’re out of budget or you can only present one possibility for a space). With virtual staging, you can present as many options as possible to your buyers so they can see the value of the space that your home offers.

So let’s say you have one vacant room in the house that hasn’t been converted to anything yet. Why not take a picture of that space and through virtual staging, convert it to a home office, a library, a nursery, a home gym, a home entertainment center and more?

The possibilities are endless. And if you have these pictures lying around during a site visit or an open house, then you can point your buyers to the direction of an offer.

Virtual Staging is all about creating a connection between the buyer and the property. And if you do this right, closing a deal won’t be as difficult as you think!