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

Wednesday Series: Why Staged Homes Don’t Sell. In the series, we are going to cover:

1. What A Well Staged Home Does for a Sale
2. How Listing Agents Unintentionally Sabotage Their Own Staged Listings
3. What is the Seller’s Problem?!
4. How A Stager Can Potentially Kill Your Deal
5. Other Real Estate Professionals’ Play in the Mud Too

It’s very common. We often want to reach across the table and strangle our clients alive or shake them violently because we can’t seem to convince our clients to come to their senses. They are turning down something that can benefit and help them make significant return on their biggest investment in their life — staging to sell their homes.

We all know that staging can help to move the homes off the market sooner, whether it’s in hot or cold markets. A staged home can also sell for more. The return on the staging investment is also far greater than the investment itself. SO WHY IS THE SELLER SAYING NO?!

There are often a few underlying issues:

1. The Seller has been burnt before by bad staging/stager. Unfortunately there are no ethnics nor regulations in the industry. Essentially anyone can claim he/she is a home stager. There are unethical stagers who rip off others’ portfolios and claim them as his/her own. There are no ways for consumers to know who is a good stager and this person is in deed who s/he is who they claim to be. The seller may have lost the faith and trust in the staging industry in general.
2. The Seller does not believe in staging. As a real estate professional, it’s our job to do whatever is best for the seller and what can help them sell for more. Staging is a proven method that can deliver that promise. So it will be our job to help educating the sellers why staging can work. Other than presenting statistics, visual presentations, I have heard of agents physically bringing their clients to staged homes and non-staged homes to let them “walk” in the buyers’ shoes.
3. The Seller is extremely patient. Patience is no longer a virtue in this case. Most sellers don’t realize that just because they are patient, not in a hurry to sell, doesn’t mean it’s good for their sale. Sure, they can wait for the perfect offer to come, but as the home sits on the market longer, that chance is only going to get slimer. The way buyers see it, the longer the house is on the market, the less attractive it is, and the more desperate the seller is. They WILL want to bargain for a lower price, while the sellers may not go for it since they only want to sell at a certain price. Furthermore, the longer a home sits on the market, it becomes stale. There are fresher, newer listings coming onto the market, which buyers are more likely to see, and buyers agents are more likely to show.
4. The Seller got greedy. Sellers usually have a number in mind of what they want to make on the sale. However, a lot of sellers don’t realize that buyers ONLY will pay whatever they are willing to pay, NOT what sellers want them to pay. Say you saw an apple that you feel you are only willing to pay $1 for, but the store wants $20, would you buy it? No, you won’t because it’s overpriced. Same with selling. Just because your product (house) shows well since the staging was done tastefully and beautifully, it doesn’t mean you can command X amount of extra money. The buyers will still only pay whatever s/he is willing to do so.
5. The Seller is not motivated at all. Motivation is the KEY of a successful sale. No matter how good the agent or the stager is, if the seller is not motivated, the sale will be difficult. The seller will find every excuse in the book to not get things done. They kill their own sales because deep down they don’t want to sell.

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