Home Staging: The Sellers’ Agent Perspective [INFOGRAPHIC]

No doubt, home staging has become one of the most significant factors in selling and buying homes. Just like dressing up for your first date, every part of your look is crucial to making that first impression. But it’s more than the decluttering, decorating, and the cleaning, you need to dress your house to impress.

So consider: put your best dress on, put on makeup if need be, and of course perfume for your finishing touch. And before you know it, you’re staging your home to look at its best, so you’re guaranteed that you present your home in a way that your buyers can envision their lives in it.

After staging, your home is at its prime, sitting pretty on the hill of the real estate market. And at that hill (not the foot of the hill), you’re guaranteed that your property is seen in the open by your potential buyers. Now, with the appealing visuals of your home, both in and out, you can expect your home to sell at a better price, skipping the disappointing negotiations that usually happen when you don’t present your home in the best possible way that you can.

What Home Staging Means for a Seller’s Agent

Now what does home staging mean for you as a seller’s agent? Well, you most likely would agree that selling a staged home is better than selling an empty home. For one, a staged home already sets the vision in a buyer — they can easily imagine themselves living in a staged home as opposed to an empty one. When you stage, it’s as if you’re creating life into a home.

But don’t just take my word for it, the statistics from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) proves exactly this, here are the numbers for your reference:

• It was common that sellers’ agents personally offered to stage the home (26%)
• 28% of sellers’ agents said they staged all sellers’ homes prior to listing them for sale.
• 13% noted that they only staged homes that are difficult to sell.
• When staging a home, 22 percent of sellers’ agents reported an increase of 1–5% of the dollar value offered by buyers, in comparison to similar homes.
• 17% of respondents stated that staging a home increased the dollar value of the home between 6 and 10%
• 28% percent of sellers’ agents stated that there were slight decreases in the time on the market when the home is staged.

Check out our infographic below for more stats! Feel free to share that too.

Finding Value in Virtual Staging

With the statistics above, you can now see the impact that staging has on the selling process. However, we all know the cost involved in staging a home is huge. You’re looking at buying or renting out furniture and home accessories, hiring help, and hours of manual labor. Not to mention the square footage that you have to cover — from bedrooms to the kitchen, living room, patio and more, and with more square footage comes more costs.

Although this seems tiring and expensive, setting up the first impression is critical for a positive flow in the buying process.

So what if you have the option to create the first impression without the huge cost and work involved? Consider: Virtual Staging.

Virtual Staging is a great alternative to traditional forms of staging, in that it creates an imagined look of a home digitally. This gives you the opportunity to create a perfectly staged image for the home but at a fraction of the cost and the effort.

You also have access to unlimited furniture and accessories in different design styles- from modern to traditional. Your possibilities for design are endless. This presents a stark contrast to having to settle to what’s currently available in the furniture store (wink!).

Now if you go for virtual staging as an option, you have to be able to sell it. As you know, selling real estate is all about creating an experience.

Virtual staging may not give your buyers the actual experience, but when you are able to transport them from an empty space into a visioned space, then you’re working miracles right then and there!