Professional home staging can help you get top dollar for your listing.

If you’ve been visiting open houses recently, chances are you come across a staged home or two.  Professional home staging has grown in popularity and we are now seeing homeowners and investors alike enticing buyers with curated spaces in just about every price range. 

Why Stage A Home?

Only 10% of prospective buyers can visualize a home looking any different than the way it looks when they walk in the door.  They need help.  Staging a home can help buyers imagine the property as a future home, create a mood, and draw attention to the home’s most desirable features.  With strategic interior design, you can show off a home’s good features and hide its flaws.

Staging is also beneficial for the digital representation of your home.  Staged photos are much more attractive than photos of an empty room.  Almost all buyers will begin their home search by looking at photos online, and a well designed home will attract much more attention and bring more visitors to your listing.

Does Staging Affect The Selling Price?

There are a couple factors to consider when evaluating the return on investment of professional home staging.  The first is time.  According to the Real Estate Staging Association (RESA), homes that had not been staged before listing sat on the market an average of 143 days.  Homes that were staged pre-listing averaged 23 days on the market.  If time is of the essence, you may want to consider staging.

It is possible that staging your home will help garner higher offers.  Besides highlighting a home’s best features, staging helps buyers imagine themselves in the home and become more emotionally attached to it.  Staging Resource claims that in a survey of 3,500 staged homes, 46% sold for 10% more than they would have un-staged.

Staging 2.0

Furniture for a whole house, let alone multiple houses, is cumbersome and takes up a lot of space.  It can be expensive to deliver and store, and those costs are passed down to the consumers.  Now, a few companies are bringing spatial innovation to the home staging market with packable and collapsible staging furniture.  These are probably not the best solutions for a luxury home, but these products would work well for smaller homes at lower price points.

Boxetti offers a “Bedroom in a Box,” which consists of a series of modules that are capable of transforming into a range of furnishings, including a bed, a desk, storage cupboards, and a wardrobe.  Once they have been used, each module can be pushed back into the box and hidden out of sight.  The minimalist design would be ideal for box rooms and loft studios that have limited space.  Boxetti has other units that can be used all around the house – including the kitchen and living room.

inFormed Space creates modern looking furniture from sheets of plastic that can be folded up.  The pieces are lightweight and rigid, and you can store a whole home’s worth of furniture in a small area.  The packages are easy and inexpensive to deliver, and easy to carry and assemble.  The pieces lock together with hidden magnets to create sleek, modern home furnishings for every room.

Dandy Pack is similar to inFormed, but uses corrugated plastic and slipcovers to create a custom, homey feel.  These reusable products include a dining table, armchairs, sofas, and beds with slipcovers in an array of colors.