How Much Should You Invest in Staging When Selling Your Apartment?
When it’s time to sell, it’s time to consider staging your apartment. Staging is the best opportunity to ensure a successful listing experience. “Successful” as in selling your apartment quickly and fetching the top dollar.
Staging goes beyond placing couches and throwing rugs around your apartment. It includes minor repairs and painting. The key to staging is knowing your target market, and successfully evaluating what your apartment needs in order to appeal to as many buyers as possible. As with all things in real estate, timing is key.
Decide to stage early. Develop a game plan at the beginning and stick to it. Staging transforms an apartment to a home, not just empty space. Evoking emotions in the potential buyer can create a committed buyer. If the buyer sees a cold, empty space he or she might turn away. Sometimes people can’t fill in the blanks, and they need visual guidance. Staging lets you give them that guidance and sell the right vision for the space, your apartment.
How much is too much?
If you’re selling your apartment for $5 million, then a $50,000 staging budget is a drop in the bucket. But if your housing budget is a bit more modest, try not to spend more than 1.5% of your list price on staging. For an apartment listed at $500,000, that means $7,500 for staging (and that’s on the high side). Personally, I advocate less is more. A few strategically placed pieces of furniture and a de-cluttered apartment will truly impact your potential buyers. Subtlety is your greatest staging weapon to make a killer first impression.
You already moved out
You’ve left the building, or the apartment in this case. Now what? Stage.
As a buyer, when I see an empty apartment I see one thing: opportunity. I see a person with two mortgages, or with a lot of capital tied up into an apartment he or she no longer wants. I look for deals, and I detect leverage for me during the negotiation process. By now, I have already made a judgment call and moved on. All buyers are like this to some degree. Without emotional connection, there is nothing to keep the buyer from walking away.
Staging may not be as beneficial when your apartment has a smaller floor plan or a poor layout. In this case, furniture may not be your friend. Get your realtors opinion, and see if they would recommend having your apartment staged or left as is. More often than not, staging is the way to go.
How important is Timing?
If you are going to stage your apartment when you list it for sale, you need to stage it from the beginning of the listing. You get one opportunity to make a lasting first impression. Staging after you’ve listed can lose you the foot traffic you need to secure an offer and otherwise would have received. There are no do overs, no second chances. You get one shot.
I’ve encountered this issue first hand. I was into a transaction on a property that was supposed to be a quick flip. The margins were tight, and I had to sell right away in order to make a profit. Except there were two problems. Clearly one of the kids practice karate on the wall instead of his practice dummy. And a preschooler painted the whole property. The walls glowed in a sickening neon green and orange, with a dash of purple for good measure.My realtor begged me to fix the wall and repaint everything a neutral color. I knew it needed work, but I didn’t want to invest the capital or time to fix it. To me, the property was good enough. The buyer could easily fix the issues and even pick the exact color scheme they wanted. And the hole in the wall might make a gorgeous built-in shelving unit. Might.
I sold my self on that plan of (in)action.For the first four weeks, the listing brimmed with activity. But no it attracted no offers. To my disappointment, all the feedback was the same: we don’t like the extreme paint and hole in the wall. I finally gave in, but my laziness cost me $15,000 dollars. A little paint and a $200 wall repair and I would have netted me $15,000! Anyone have a time machine?
So always listen to your realtor. The team at TripleMint is a trusted resource that can guide you through your transaction from end to end. When they tell you it is time to stage your apartment, stage. It will pay dividends in the long run.
This post is contributed from our friends at TripleMint. TripleMint is a full-service real-estate brokerage that combines technology, teamwork and personalized service. Its advanced, easy-to-use platform pools listings and updates continuously, allowing its users to see everything NYC brokers see. Maybe more.
Originally published at www.aptdeco.com.
