When it comes time to sell your beloved home, you want the buyers to love it as much as you have all these years. But what are the chances of them falling in love with your used furniture and family photos on the walls? Pretty slim, we say.

As the vendor, your main aim is to make your potential buyer feel as though your home is perfect for them, ready to be moved into straight away.

This is where home staging enters the selling process.

What Are the Benefits of Home-Staging?

If you are considering selling your home, you may be asking yourself if it’s really necessary to spend the money on professional styling. Let’s make an important distinction: Home Staging is not an expense; it is an investment. And just like with any other investments, we measure the ROI (Return On Investment).

Probably the most favourable benefit of them all – a better sale price.

Bringing in high-end furniture makes the interior appear more luxurious, which, as a natural consequence, lifts the perceived value of the house. Even though we see the empirical evidence of styled properties receiving higher offers, it’s virtually impossible to calculate the exact dollar amount of the ROI after staging.

This is because there are too many factors that affect the value of the house (choice of agent, marketing strategy, quality of photography, current market, etc.). We do however have lots of case studies of properties that have been listed in the same market previously (unstyled) and re-listed again after staging. The difference in offer amounts on average was extra $50k – $100k! Click on the article below to see the individual homes.

Click here to read “How Much Does Home-Staging Cost?”

A home that’s been on the market for too long raises suspicions among the buyers. People make assumptions that there must be something wrong with the house, or that the other buyers who viewed it found out something that others don’t know about and that’s why they lost interest. After all, it’s only human to dislike what everyone else dislikes.

According to a Survey of 900 Top Real Estate Agents, 83% of agents said that a staged home sells faster than a vacant property. We can’t speak on behalf of any other Home-Staging company, but our records indicate that the average time it takes to sell one of our staged properties in Brisbane is 4 weeks*.

*as of 15th of October 2021

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Read “Does Home-Staging *actually* work?”

Remember the 7 second rule from previous paragraph? These days, those precious first seconds are spent looking at photos online. This has become more apparent at the start of the pandemic, when the in-person open house tours were either limited or halted altogether, so buyers had to rely purely on photos or virtual tours in search of their dream home.

Regardless of the current market performance, beautiful photography is always guaranteed to lure more people in. Hiring a professional photographer is one thing, but even the best photographer in the world can only capture what’s in front of him. An experienced Property Stylist knows exactly which angles and colours make the photos pop. From there on it becomes a numbers game as more eyes on the listing translate to more enquiries.

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TIP: Don’t believe us? You can see it for yourself! Simply jump on realestate.com.au and search for similar homes in the same suburb, one presented styled and the other unstyled. Next, open both listings, scroll all the way down and look at the number of page views. The difference will blow your mind!

Purchasing a home is one of the biggest decisions we’ll ever have to make, which can make the whole buying/deciding process a bit overwhelming.  As a prospective buyer, it’s perfectly normal to look at several houses before settling on the one, but it also means it’s easy to lose track of which was which. From the home seller’s perspective, you’d want to make your home memorable, and what better way to make this happen than with professional styling.

There is nothing special or thought-provoking about empty rooms, but having velvet pink occasional chairs in the living room? Unforgettable!

The Home-Staging field (just like every other industry) is filled with myths and misconceptions. One of the more common misbeliefs is that people would rather see the rooms empty, so they can gauge the true size of the area. This could not be further from the truth.

Furnishing the room is the best way to showcase the actual size of the space, taking away any guesswork and doubts from buyers’ minds. Unless the buyer is an industry expert, chances are they are not going to be able to tell whether the space fits a 2-seater or a 3-seater sofa until they see it for themselves.

Professional styling becomes even more advantageous in properties with tricky layouts. Curving walls, thorough-fares, triangular rooms, or vaulted ceilings can leave the buyers confused or even discouraged from buying altogether, as they fail to visualise a good use of the space. Furnishing it will remove this worry and show the potential of the area.

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Read “Top 5 Home-Staging Myths Busted”

Another perk of inviting a professional Property Stylist into your home is that they will look at your house with fresh eyes. As they’re walking through, they are picturing where the buyers’ gaze will flow and making mental notes of which features to highlight and which ones to draw the attention away from. If you’ve been living in your house for a few years, this may be difficult to pull off on your own, as your eyes would have gotten used to seeing your home a certain way. You may completely overlook the scuff mark on the wall or the chipping paint, but the prospective buyers will see it all, adding up the renovation costs in their mind.

Staging a home has the power to highlight your home’s best features, by creating a visual focal point with the right furniture layout, as well as distract from the less desirable features by keeping the buyers’ gaze fixated on the styling.  That is the main reason why older houses are among the properties that benefit from staging the most.

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Read “Styling an Older House for Sale | Worth it or Not?”

Thanks for reading!

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