Home Staging

Definition of "Home Staging"

Karin Turner, Real Estate Agent CENTURY 21 North Shore

If “image is everything”, then home staging is the most important and effective process in a real estate sale.

But what is home staging?

Well, when real estate agents are hired to sell a house, they hire a professional to enhance the features of that house and make it look bigger and better so the home buyer gets attracted to it and makes a good offer on the house. This action of highlighting the best of the property and hiding the worst of it is called Home Staging.

Home stager is the name of the professional hired to do the home staging, and he (or she) usually makes sure the natural light entering the house is not blocked by anything, nor is the passage of people: in fact, one of the key principles of home staging is re-arranging the house and its furniture in a way that it helps home buyers to flow through the open houses and showings they attend. It’s all about decluttering, organizing and creating an illusion to suggest the possible home buyers a view into their future inside that house.

There are some that are critics toward home staging. They believe it narrows down the possible pool of home buyers because if the home stager does something too specific, it might throw some people off.

To that, the response coming from home stagers is usually to stage each room in a different way, with a different design trend for each room, so it expands the chances of pleasing more than one type of person. But aside from becoming more expensive, it makes the home staging less cohesive, almost gimmicky. So, the response coming from real estate agents to that criticism is usually doing a Vanilla Shell.

However, another way to look at it, is that anyone can be thrown off by a number of things no one can calculate, so it’s smarter to focus not on the people that might not like a specific trend of that home stage, but on the people that do follow that trend, and will be impacted by seeing it well displayed on that house. So, in the end, what’s important in a home staging is knowing your target audience, so it will commit to an aesthetic and enhance the house features within that point-of-view. By doing that, the chances of selling the house – for the best price you can – are greatly increased.

Real Estate tip:

Don’t stage your knowledge. Find a local real estate agent to be your best weapon toward the best sale!