Property Investment Advice

Evaluating the Usefulness of Home Staging

Are you contemplating to sell your property anytime soon? Well, you better start fixing up your place before selling it. But wait, do you know how to do the fixing up? In real estate, merely cleaning the place and straightening clutters is not enough. You need to know how to properly stage a home. 

Staging is not a just general cleaning. It is not a whole day activity of cleaning and removing dust, organizing your stuff and re-arranging the furniture. It is an art and it has discipline. 

Every time you stage your home, you think what needs to be shown. You also think what the buyers think if they see this particular piece. You arrange the home to make it more appealing to the buyer. 

So why do this when in fact you could just put a "as is" clause on the ad? Well, you can always do that. However, you must look at your current real estate market. If you have been reading the news, there is no easy selling these days. Inventories are up and your competitions are quite a handful. If you do not do something to give your homes an edge, then it will probably just sit in the market for days and eventually, keep losing its value. 

Here's how you can evaluate the usefulness of home staging, by taking a look at the facts. 

Home staging resource showed various statistics taken from various publications, surveys and associations on what their stand on staging is. For the United States Housing and Urban Development, staged homes would sell 17% greater than those that are not. The same finding were obtained by RESA when they made a study with regards to unstaged homes. An analysis was made for years 2007 and 2008 (the time when real estate market was at its worst) to compare how houses sold when they were staged. Homes were categorized as un-staged not sold, previously occupied homes un-staged and previously vacant un-staged. All of these homes sat on the market for over 100 days but when they were staged, selling days was cut by 68% to 89% lesser when they were un-staged. 

Aside from fast selling period, real estate professionals have also been proven that home staging allows homeowners to walk away with more money. This can be shown in the results of the Home Gain Survey. They reported that certain ways of staging a home would allow homeowners to get good returns on investment. As simple as cleaning and de-cluttering your homes at a cost of 190 to 318 dollars would give you an return on investment of 578%. Staging a home for sale would give you a 343% ROI. 

What more do you need to know? Professional stagers and real estate agents, believe in its capabilities. In fact, these people have years of expertise and experience in selling that they have observed the positive effects of staging. 

There is no harm in trying. Besides, if you have to fix up the place, you need to do it the right way. And of course, you do not necessarily have to spend thousands of dollars to prep your home. Get some advice on how to stage your homes within your budget and see how fast selling your homes will be, considering how slow the real estate market is.