Home Staging for Listings Video
Watch a short video about reasons about home staging for listings and what we do about it!
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Home Staging Decreases Time on Market
Home Staging Decreases Time on Market, Finds Realtors® Report
Home Staging Decreases Time on Market, Finds Realtors® Report
MEDIA CONTACT: JANE DOLLINGER / 202-383-1042 / jdollinger@realtors.org
WASHINGTON (July 6, 2017) — Sixty-two percent of sellers’ agents say that staging a home decreases the amount of time a home spends on the market, according to the National Association of Realtors® 2017 Profile of Home Staging, www.nar.realtor/reports/profile-of-home-staging.
“Realtors® know how important it is for buyers to be able to picture themselves living in a home and, according to NAR’s most recent report, staging a home makes that process much easier for potential buyers,” said NAR President William E. Brown, a Realtor® from Alamo, California and founder of Investment Properties. “While all real estate is local, and many factors play into what a home is worth and how much buyers are will to pay for it, staging can be the extra step sellers take to help sell their home more quickly and for a higher dollar value.”
According to the report, which is in its second iteration, nearly two-thirds of sellers’ agents said that staging a home decreases the amount of time the home spends on the market, with 39 percent saying that it greatly decreases the time and 23 percent saying it slightly decreases the time. Sixteen percent of sellers’ agents believe that staging either greatly or slightly increases a home’s time on the market, while 8 percent believe that it has no impact.
Seventy-seven percent of buyers’ agents said that staging a home makes it easier for buyers to visualize the property as their future home, and 40 percent are more willing to walk through a staged home they first saw online. However, 38 percent of buyers’ agents said that staging positively affects a home’s value if the home is decorated to the buyer’s taste, meaning that a home’s staging should be designed to appeal to the largest number of potential buyers.
Forty-nine percent of buyers’ agents said that staging has an effect on most buyers. Another 48 percent stated that staging has an effect on some buyers’ opinion of a home, but not always, and only 4 percent said that it has no impact on buyers.
Realtors® representing both buyers and sellers agreed that the living room is the most important room in a home to stage, followed by the master bedroom, the kitchen, and then the yard or outdoor space. The guest bedroom is considered the least important room to stage.
The highest share of buyers’ agents, 31 percent, reported that staging a home increases its dollar value by 1 to 5 percent. Thirteen percent said that staging increases the dollar value 6 to 10 percent, while 25 percent stated it has no impact on dollar value. Only 1 percent of buyers’ agents felt that staging has a negative impact on a home’s dollar value.
Sellers’ agents report even more value is added from staging: 29 percent reported an increase of one to five percent in dollar value offered by buyers, 21 percent reporting an increase of 8 to 10 percent, and 5 percent reported an increase of 11 to 15 percent. No sellers’ agents reported a negative impact.
When deciding which homes to stage, 38 percent of sellers’ agents said that they stage all of their sellers’ homes before listing them, 14 percent will stage only homes that are difficult to sell, and 7 percent stage only homes in higher price brackets. Thirty-seven percent of sellers’ agents said they do not stage homes before listing them, but they recommend sellers declutter their homes and fix any faults with the property.
When it comes to paying for home staging, 25 percent of the time the seller pays before listing the home. Twenty-one percent of sellers’ agents will personally provide funds to stage the home, while 14 percent of agents will offer home staging services to sellers.
Beyond staging, agents also named the most common home improvement projects they recommend to sellers: Ninety-three percent recommend decluttering the home, 89 percent recommend an entire home cleaning, and 81 percent recommend carpet cleaning. Other pre-sale projects include depersonalizing the home, removing pets during showings and making minor repairs.
In March 2017, NAR invited a random sample of 53,760 active Realtor® members to fill out an online survey. A total of 1,894 useable responses were received for an overall response rate of 3.5 percent. At the 95 percent confidence level the margin of error is plus-or-minus 2.25 percent.
The National Association of Realtors®, “The Voice for Real Estate,” is America’s largest trade association, representing more than 1.2 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate industries.
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Home Staging Decreases Time on Market, Finds Realtors® Report
© 2017 Florida Realtors
Home Staging Decreases Time on Market, Finds Realtors® Report
Find this article on the website of the National Association of Realtors®
Top 10 Tips for Staging a Home for Photos
Find this article on realtor.org
Top 10 Tips for Staging a Home for Photos
Posted in Staging Tips, by Blog Contributor on November 30, 2015
By Justin Riordan, Spade and Archer Design Agency
Ah, yes the beloved Top 10 list. If only life were that simple and any skill you ever wanted to learn could be perfected with just 10 easy to learn, neatly packaged tips. I can see it now… “The top 10 tips for removing your own brain tumor” or “The top 10 tips for raising the dead.” Now don’t get me wrong — I don’t think that having your house photographed is as complicated as brain surgery or necromancy but it is often best left to the professionals. However, if you find yourself without a professional and needing to prepare your house for photographs either for a vacation rental, to sell it, or to just show off your new digs to friends and family, here are Spade and Archer’s top 10 tips on how to best get’r done.
1. Design for the camera, not for the end user
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
When putting together a space, we always think of the camera first. Will this angle look right, will it show off the best feature of the house? Will the light hit these items correctly? The good news is you have a camera in your pocket as you read this. When we stage a house for market, we are constantly taking photographs of it and looking at it through the camera lens. It helps us to see errors in symmetry, lighting, cleanliness, etc.
2. No more wrinkles
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
In real life, wrinkly sheets don’t make a lick of difference. You will still sleep the same and wake up refreshed, whether you iron the sheets or not. The camera, however, hates wrinkles and makes them look 100 times worse than they really are. Our best advice on this one is to use a professional steamer. The hot steam will take those wrinkles right out and makes the sheets, pillows, shower curtains, etc. all look perfect in the picture.
3. Light it up.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
Light can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If you don’t know how to control it, you are destined to fail. The time of day and weather conditions can make a huge difference on how well your space photographs. If the afternoon sun is blazing into your room throwing harsh shadows all over, the shot is destined to look “blown out” with areas as dark as night and as bright as a nuclear holocaust. To help combat this problem, look for the best time for indirect sunlight outside and inside your space. Cloudy days are perfect for this. It is also a great idea to turn on your interior lights and lamps, this will help to even out the lighting in the space.
4. Fluff the carpet.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
Sorry, fellas, this is not a euphemism for dining out. So often we see houses photographed with harsh vacuum lines or matted carpet that looks old and tired. The best way to fluff up your tired wall to wall is to use a broom. Running the broom over the top of the carpet in random directions will bring new life to a sagging floor textile.
5. Look beyond the window.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
It’s true enough you are photographing the interiors of your space but the outside of your windows will be seen in the photos. If there are piles of trash covered with blue tarps right outside your window, they are going to come through in the photos. Clean up the areas outside the window and make it visually quiet so it does not draw attention to itself. If the area can’t be cleaned up, consider a frosted film on the window.
6. Limit the color scheme.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
There are neutrals and there are colors. The neutrals are black, white, grey, brown, beige, cream, silver, and sometimes gold. You can put as many different neutrals in a room as you want. They can form a great base for your color. The colors are the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Colors must be used with great restraint. We endeavor to have only one “color story” per room. A color story might be blues or reds or colors of the peacock, or teal and yellow. If you have more than one color story per room, the photographs will start to look chaotic and visually noisy.
7. Rely on symmetry, repetition, rhythm.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
Symmetry, repetition, and rhythm can be found throughout nature and humans find them to be aesthetically pleasing. Symmetry can be found in most animals and insects. Repetition is why we find flowers so pleasing. Rhythm can be found in the ripples of a sand dune. A quick and easy way to make a space more aesthetically pleasing is to use these simple principles of good design.
8. Look at the problem from a different angle, then design for the best one.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
So often when I am first training a designer, they worry about every angle that a room will be seen from. I find them paralyzed by viable arguments, both good and bad, derived from seeing a space from two vantage points. I always tell them the same thing. What is the first impression going to be? Design for that view and the rest will fall into place. Figure out where the camera will most likely be and make every decision for the room based on that. Chances are, it will turn out great.
9. Hire a professional.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
It always makes me so sad when clients pay me lots of money to make their house beautiful then they run through with an iPhone and snap 16 horrible pictures of our beautiful space. I always wonder why they choose to spend thousands of dollars on staging and then value engineer (that is a euphemism for cheeping out) a photographer to save a couple hundred dollars. My best advice is if you want great photographs, hire a great photographer.
10. Put down the toilet seat.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
The fact that this is even on the list is nuts … yet, I still see a picture of the bathroom with the toilet seat up at least once a month. Why not just hang up a sign that says, “I suck, so don’t buy my house. Seriously, I’m super lame.” It would be just as effective.
11. Get out of the mirror.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
There is really only one thing douchier than the toilet seat left up. It’s you holding an iPhone in the mirror. If you are still confused how to best correct this error, refer to No. 10: Hire a professional.
12. Furnish the house, but don’t over decorate the cake.
Photo Credit: Spade and Archer Design Agency
Empty houses are hard to see. Furniture provides scale, shows use, and adds light to spaces. Without it, the space is just walls, windows, floors, and ceilings. It is important to show how the space is used and how big the space is. Once you have taken care of these items, then stop decorating. There is a point when the decoration is no longer about the house but more so about the decoration. Stop before you get there.
So I see I have more than 10 tips for getting good photographs for your house. Honestly, I have about 4,000 more. I wish I could teach them all to you but then again, I would be teaching myself out of a job. Good luck out there, kiddos!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Justin Riordan, LEED AP, is founder of Spade and Archer Design Agency based in Portland, Ore. As the creative energy behind Spade and Archer, Riordan fuses his formal training as an architect with his natural design savvy to create beautiful and authentic spaces for clients. Prior to opening Spade and Archer in 2009, Riordan practiced interior architecture and interior construction for 12 years, bringing an esteemed skillset and diverse background to home staging. Since founding Spade and Archer, he has personally prepared more than 2,100 homes for market.
Blog Contributor
This post was contributed exclusively for REALTOR® Magazine.
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Does Staging Helps to Sell ?
Most homeowners know it is important to keep a home clean, bright and free from clutter while it is on the market for sale. But sometimes, Realtors® say, taking the extra step to stage a home can make a difference in how a buyer values it and the price a seller might get for it, according to the National Association of Realtors® 2015 Profile of Home Staging.
“Realtors® know how important it is to have a home in the best shape possible when showing it to prospective buyers,” said NAR President Chris Polychron, executive broker with 1st Choice Realty in Hot Springs, Arkansas. “At a minimum, homeowners should conduct a thorough cleaning, haul out clutter, make sure the home is well-lit and fix any major aesthetic issues. Another option is staging a home, which Realtors® often suggest to sellers to help prospective buyers better visualize themselves in the home and could modestly increase the home’s value for both the buyer and seller.”
The report, the first of its kind from NAR, found that 49 percent of surveyed Realtors® who work with buyers believe staging usually has an effect on the buyer’s view of the home. Another 47 percent believe that staging only sometimes has an impact on a buyer’s view of the home only. Only 4 percent of Realtors® said staging has no impact on buyer perceptions.
Realtors® on the buyer side believe that staging makes an impact in several ways; 81 percent said staging helps buyers visualize the property as a future home, while 46 percent said it makes prospective buyers more willing to walk through a home they saw online. Forty-five percent said a home decorated to a buyer’s tastes positively impacts its value; however, 10 percent of Realtors® said a home decorated against a buyer’s tastes could negatively impact the home’s value.
From the seller side, a majority of Realtors® utilize staging as a tool in at least some instances. Just over a third of Realtors® (34 percent) utilize staging on all homes, while 13 percent tend to stage only those homes difficult to sell, and another 4 percent will do so only for higher priced homes. The median cost spent on staging a home is $675. Sixty-two percent of Realtors® representing sellers say they offer home staging service to sellers, while 39 percent say the seller pays before listing the home.
Realtors® representing both the buyer and seller agreed on two major points in the report—which rooms should be staged and the change in dollar value a buyer is willing to offer for a staged home compared to a similar not-staged home. Realtors® ranked the living room as the number one room to stage, followed by a kitchen. Rounding out the top five rooms were the master bedroom, dining room and the bathroom.
Realtors® believe that buyers most often offer a 1 to 5 percent increase on the value of a staged home (37 percent from Realtors® representing sellers and 32 percent from Realtors® representing buyers). Additionally, 22 percent of Realtors® representing sellers and 16 percent of Realtors® representing buyers said the increase is closer to 6 to 10 percent.
“Working with a Realtor® gives buyers, sellers and investors the advantage they need to succeed in today’s market, as they know what buyers want and how to best market and stage a home for sale,” Polychron said. “While many factors play into what a home is worth and what buyers are willing to pay for it, staging is an excellent tool that can be used to give a home a little extra push for sellers. Staging isn’t used by every Realtor® in every situation, but the impact it may have and the value it can bring is clear to both home buyers and sellers.”
