Burlingame home staging, San Mateo home staging, San Francisco home staging

I recently spoke with a homeowner who has relocated for her job and recently also had a baby. She and her husband had decided to put the home on the market for sale. But then a natural disaster had happened that caused the portion of the freeway by their home split (Devil’s Slide) so there weren’t a lot of activities because it was difficult to show. The the Slide had reopened finally after a few months, the golden time of the listing had already passed, of course. So now they are paying for 2 mortgages, one is the one in the bay area and the other in Virginia.

I had asked her bluntly “Why do you think this home has not sold?” “Because it is not staged, it’s empty.” “Why didn’t you stage it?” “The Realtors said we don’t need to.”

Already feeling her pain, I asked,

“So what do you plan to do now?”

“The Realtor said we should think about a price reduction.”

WHAT?! Staging a home costs SO MUCH LESS than a price reduction which generally runs about $10,000 or more depending where you are. I cannot even imagine what kind of sensible agent would recommend such thing when they had committed to work for their clients’ best interests. Additionally, what financially smart agents would recommend such option to reduce their own commission significantly?

Why staging is a much superior option than price reductions?

1. It’s cheaper! The typical cost of staging a vacant home is well below $10,000 for an average home (this number is varied because of location, square footage, conditions of the home, entry and exit issues, etc.), but the cost of price reduction is DEFINITELY more than $10,000.
2. It just makes more sense economically for both sellers & agents. Doesn’t it? Investing couple thousand dollars on staging is definitely losing several tens and thousands of dollars in your final net profit? Additionally, if you are an agent, think about your commission.Let’s say the home is listed at $899,000 un-staged. And it has not sold and you are thinking about price reduction. A typical price reduction is generally more than $10,000. So let’s say now the new listing price is $875,000. That is $24,000 less in your net profit as the seller. As an agent, that’s $360 less in your commission (based on the 6% seller-buyer agent splits, and 50-50% split with the agent’s office). Now in San Francisco bay area, a typical home is at least 1 million dollars. On a million-dollar home, your damage can be significantly more.
3. Sure, price sells the home, but staged homes show better. Therefore, staged homes will SELL your home BETTER. It is often very difficult to imagine your own belongings in someone else’s home (therefore, the golden rule of staging is to de-personalize). But most people don’t even realize that it is even more difficult to imagine your own belongings into an empty space. The normal tendency is that you feel the empty space is smaller than it really is. What staging does is to provide a spatial relativity to how big and small things are. Think about in CSI type of shows, when police collect evidence, they would place a common everyday object like a quarter next to the evidence (when they don’t have a ruler) to show the relativity of the objects. Similiary with staging, our job as stagers is to show your buyers that your furniture will be able to fit in this space! It is actually a large room! That’s why we arrange furniture to trick the eyes so people will feel the room is bigger than it is.
4. Our other job as a stager is to show buyers that you too, can live in a space like this! I often tell sellers & agents that we try our best to achieve the model home or hotel look. Why? Simply because everyone wants to live in those spaces!

So if you are contemplating about reducing your sell price, call a profssional stager first. You don’t even have to think about actually staging. You can ask for a consultation first to see if the stager’s recommendation makes sense. If it makes sense to you to stage, do it before you take that price reduction!

STAGING IS ALWAYS MUCH CHEAPER THAN YOUR FIRST PRICE REDUCTION!

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