Staged4more Home Staging + Redesigns | Home Staging in San Francisco Bay: San Francisco, San Mateo Counties

The secret is out! Staging is taking the real estate world by storm. It used to be that I only get called by the agents, now I get call by home sellers before they hire a real estate agent and they ask for my opinion on what to look for when I hire an agent. Home owners call me and ask for my opinions how I can stage their homes so they can be most open house ready. The sellers know they need to stage, but they don’t know why. Does every home need to be staged? Why should a home be staged? When is the best time to stage?

Staging, essentially, is packaging. It’s that red little bow that gets you excited at Christmas morning. You look the glistening shine of that red ribbon and you are tickled with joy because you know inside the box is something you have been waiting for. And the unknown potential of the gift excites you. Similarly, same goes with buying a home. Put yourself in the buyers shoes for a second. It’s exciting, you look at home after home until you wear your agent out. You are buying your dream home, you are buying a home that can make all your dreams come true and see them realized in– those walk in closets you have always wanted, the blue pool you want your kids to jump into during a hot summer day, and the green grassy lawns your future grandchildren will run on. Buyers want to pay the littlest money to buy the biggest, newest and prettiest house on the block and in the neighborhood. They want to have a house warming party where guests can’t stop gushing about how great their new home is and how jealous they are about your new dig. So… Where does staging come in from all of this? Staging bridges the gap by helping the buyers realizing the potential of their future dream home.

Say you go look at a starter home that has a tricky floor plan, where there is a really wide hallway in between the living room and the kitchen, but everything else is great and fine. Cute neighborhood, great lot, small backyard, just a good size for a young couple. But you don’t know what to do with this odd room. You will feel crazy cramped when you put a china cabinet there. It looks like a ridiculously large hallway but a tiny room that you can’t do anything with. The vacant space doesn’t speak to you. All you see are the dead flies in the corner of the room, every cracks on the wall, because there are nowhere else to look but down, literally. Your dream home is fading away and you quickly veto this house in your head. The rest of the home tour, you said no, no, and no. You, as a buyer, already put this home on the death sentence before you saw the rest.

Say this home is staged. Things may be a little bit different. You walk into the space, oh, there is a nice little dining set here. That looks fun. It looks intimate. Ah, how about an intimate dinner for 2, or a fun family pizza night with the young one. It’s possible. There are possibilities.

Let’s look at scenario 2. You walk in the home with dark moss green carpet. Oh my goddness. What is this? Ack, leaving now. The home looks outdated. But you may not know the back story behind it, where the seller lived here for a very long time until he was widowed recently. He is selling because he is moving to a senior community where he can meet other people and have an active social life. The home had gold foil mirrors and popcorn ceiling, the decor was outdated but he didn’t care. It was his home, somewhere that happy memories happened. He was used to how the home looks. It was a pair of old shoes, comfortable and homey. But buyers don’t see that, all they saw was the green carpet & the gold mirror tiles.

They didn’t know the seller was financially strained. It took a lot of money to get the gold mirror tiles off the wall and removed the popcorn ceiling. It also took longer than they anticipated to get everything sanded down, primed and repainted. By the time they had finished removing the mirrors, scraped off the popcorn ceiling and freshly painted all the walls and ceiling, re-did the bathroom, they had hardly any funds left. They had several phone calls back and forth with their stager and the stager worked with their budget and recommended to stage the key rooms only instead of the entire home. Once the furnishing went in, the green carpet was not such an eye sore. It broke up the sea of green and people was able to see pass through it.

So, why staging? As you can tell from the stories of two real clients of mine, you can see that staging can help the potential buyers realize the space, the potential of the home, and not focusing on the less desirable traits of the home. And as you can see for yourself, the best time to stage is before it is ready to show, meaning you will only want to put a home on the market when everything is absolutely ready. Staging is about transforming a home into a listing, which becomes a product that opens its door to the masses. The sellers & agents should consider staging prior to putting the homes on the market and will NOT open their doors to the public until the listings are absolutely ready to make its winning first impressions. Well known author Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point, wrote about the power of first impression in his follow up book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. He uses several real life examples to theorize that it only takes that first few blinks for the impressions to be set, which he coins as “thin slicing.” He argues that once the impression is set, people had a innate sense of directions that will guide them to see if they will accept or reject this product. The thin slicing works as an internal compass that is almost always correct. So make that “blink” count.