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How to Tell if Your Home Does Not Need Home Staging to Sell
Your home might not need home staging to sell. Do you know how you can tell? Well, for starters, you probably can’t on your own. But if you ask a top Sacramento Realtor whose specialty is solely working with sellers, I bet she can tell you. When your entire focus in Sacramento real estate is listing homes and selling them — and you don’t work with buyers — you view the world through a dedicated lens. You see things differently than other agents. At least that is the case with me.
I can tell you in a heartbeat if your home does not need home staging to sell. Some homes do not require home staging, and since part of my goal is to increase net profit for a seller, I’m not sending them down that path in every situation. Because some situations simply don’t call for home staging.
Oh, you’ll hear agents say every home shows better with home staging, and that’s not entirely true. For example, tiny, small homes don’t always show better with staging. Too much furniture can crowd a small house. It can make a small house appear even smaller. A buyer will never know she can’t fit a bed in a small bedroom if there isn’t a bed there.
Two homes that I’m presently working on listing don’t need staging and for different reasons. One home is unique, with vintage designer wallpaper. Wood windows. Wood ceiling, beams and fancy millwork. Random planked floors. Handmade braided rag floor covering, wall-to-wall. It’s a special storybook house. Staging might detract from the period and make the home seem smaller. It’s not that large to start with.
Another home features a long room at the entrance, with a delightful bonus view through French doors at the other end. That’s the selling feature. The million dollar shot. I explained to that seller that she should stage the living room / dining area, separating the two spaces. While she does not need home staging to sell, she should stage that very important first impression space. Bring into focus the original fireplace and send the view out into the back yard.
This seller was excited when she called yesterday to say she met with my preferred home stager. The stager not only promised to stage the living area, but she threw in for free the staging of a yoga studio out back. As a bonus for the seller, she said, because I refer so much business to the stager. She makes me look good, and my seller is very happy!
If you really want to know if you need home staging to sell, ask an experienced Realtor for her opinion. In our present seller’s market, it is possible your home does not need home staging to sell.
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.
