Myths About Sacramento Home Staging

Lots of people, apparently, want to know how Sacramento home staging works, especially those people who don’t live in Sacramento or are not professional real estate agents, because I get those calls every week. I’ve discovered there are some weird misperceptions about home stagers. The first is some people tend to believe that Sacramento real estate agents offer this service, when little is further from the truth. I wonder if they get this idea from HGTV? We can recommend expert home stagers, but we don’t do the work ourselves.

That would be like asking us to direct and produce a movie. We might enjoy stuffing popcorn into our mouths and gluing our eyeballs to the silver screen as we observe Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Ellar Coltrane slowly age over 12 years in that haunting movie Boyhood playing over at the Tower Theatre, but we don’t even know which direction to point a movie camera. It doesn’t mean we don’t recognize a good movie, connect with the content, scenery, acting and appreciate the aesthetics, but we don’t make movies. Holding an iPhone to video your cat chasing chicken treats is not directing a movie, which is what it would be like if a real estate agent suddenly decided to stage homes. Trust me, you want your Realtor to wear one hat. A real estate agent hat.

I have written many articles about home staging because I understand how staging works, but I do not possess that artistic ability nor the specialized training, and I don’t belong to the home stagers association. I sell real estate in Sacramento, and I’m a top producer real estate agent — that’s my shtick. You want top dollar for your home and to sell it as quickly as humanely possible, I’m your person. I market. I price right. I network; I don’t stage.

The second myth I hear from some people is they somehow hope that a Sacramento real estate agent will pay for the seller’s home staging. I don’t know of any agents in Sacramento who pay for their seller’s home staging, and that has never been my practice. That’s akin to washing the windows or fixing a hole in the roof, we don’t do it. The fee for Sacramento home staging is the seller’s financial responsibility. The seller will typically get more money if the home is staged, so it’s to the seller’s advantage to stage it.

For example, I recently sold a home that comped out at the top end, the very top end, at $250,000. We put it on the market with the home staging in place and immediately received an offer of $265,000. Now, the price to stage this home was roughly $1100 a month. Was Sacramento home staging worth it to this seller? What do your instincts tell you? As veteran agents, we learn over the years whose home staging sells and whose doesn’t.

Not every home needs to be staged and not every room needs home staging. Your Sacramento real estate agent can tell you whether your home needs staging. Maybe it doesn’t. She can also advise as to whether you need to play up the dramatics in every single room. That’s just the starting point. As we move through the sale process, sometimes we add other pieces of the puzzle to make the sale. I’ll even help a seller to rearrange her furniture, but I don’t pretend to be something I am not. I know what I am: a top notch Sacramento Realtor.