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Does ‘staging’ a home lure buyers into paying more?

 

By

DANIELGOLDSTEIN

PERSONAL FINANCE REPORTER

Plastic surgery might improve one’s looks. But so might a little makeup. When it comes to making your house more attractive to prospective buyers, home staging is definitely in the makeup category.

What is home staging? Just like makeup, it’s an on-the-surface solution. Staging can help your place look its best during the sales period without the cost or expense of a renovation. For about $3,500 to $4,500 a month, the home you’re about to put on the market can be filled with great-looking furniture, well-considered accessories and tasteful art.

Don’t expect home staging to conceal your house’s flaws, says Shell Brodnax, chief executive of the Real Estate Staging Association (or RESA) in Valley Springs, Calif., southeast of Sacramento.

“Staging doesn’t conceal anything, but it accentuates what’s already there,” Brodnax says.

www.stagetomove.com
Before staging.
www.stagetomove.com
After staging.

While home staging is in part about showing a property in its best possible light, it can also help potential buyers imagine themselves in the space. Particularly after a move-out, or before a property has ever been occupied, many buyers like to see what a room really looks like, how it lives. “Buyers have a hard time envisioning themselves if it’s empty,” says Scott Leverette of McGuire Real Estate in Berkeley, Calif. “I think also a home looks smaller if it’s empty.”

Theresa Janaitis, a 42-year-old writer, used a home stager to sell her house in New Jersey when she was moving to Los Angeles.

Janaitis spent about $7,000 to the stager, who recommended changing several light fixtures and removing wallpaper and several pieces of furniture before moving rental furniture in and adding wall art.

The results were impressive, Janaitis says. “The house sold the same day and for $30,000 over the list price,” she says, and she attributes that to its staging. Later, when she began looking at homes in California, she also appreciated seeing homes that had been staged. “It really help you visualize how to use the room,” she says.

Prices for staging typically vary by state but typically start with a $250 to $750 initial consultation (you’ll pay less for a casual “walk and talk” consultation, more for a written plan) for an average single-family home of 2,500 to 3,000 square feet. If the home already has some furniture, you’re looking at between $700 (in Iowa) and $4,800 (in California) a month for a two-month staging effort.

If the home is completely vacant, and you want the entire house staged, prices can range from as little as $975 a month (in Indiana) to $5,500 a month (in, again, California), according to RESA.

If your space is smaller, such as a condo unit, with under 1,000 square feet, you’ll be looking at monthly staging costs for a vacant unit of $2,000 to $3,200, according to RESA. A larger house of 4,000 square feet or more would cost $9,000 a month.

So does staging really result in higher sales prices, multiple bidders and quicker sales? In a 2013 study looking at nearly 170 staged properties valued at $300,000 to $499,000, RESA — which obviously has a vested interest in the matter — said that those homes were sold in 22 days, compared with an average on-market time of 125 days for unstaged properties.

www.hspfla.com
Before staging.
www.hspfla.com
After staging.

Leverette, who works in the red-hot Bay Area market, said the extra money spent on staging works to his selling clients’ advantage. “The marketing photos are better, which in turn makes the marketing materials, like my websites and all the feeder sites [such as Realtor.com, Trulia and Redfin] and fliers better,” he says. Leverette also says he’s never needed to extend a home-staging agreement beyond 60 days. “The home almost always sells before the staging period ends.”

Staging isn’t always necessary, however. “In a hot area, where listings don’t last on the multiple listing service [for] long, spending the money to stage may not be necessary,” says Bruce DarConte, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker in Washington, D.C. “One size doesn’t fit all.”

On the flip side, Leverette says that when he’s a buyer’s agent he tries to ensure comparisons are the same so that a client doesn’t miss a good buying opportunity because one house is staged and another isn’t. “I have to open their eyes to other homes that are not staged because they will not go as wild over it,” he says. “You need to see the bones of the house, not the staging.” In addition, when a home is unstaged, “there may be an opportunity to get a home without the same level of competition.” Leverette also says that he has to often help his clients look past the staging to the real condition of the home. “The fancy towels in the bathroom can take your eye away from the fact that the tub is chipped,” he says.

And it’s not entirely clear that staging contributes to higher selling prices. Staging made no difference in terms of the final selling price, according to a 2012 study by several real estate professors and researchers published in 2015 by the Journal of Housing Research. “Homeowners rationally do not significantly differ in their valuations based on staging conditions,” according to the study’s authors, who took more than 800 prospective buyers on a virtual home tour.

The authors — Michael Seiler, a professor of real estate and finance at the College of William & Mary, Mark Lane of Old Dominion University and Vicky Seiler of Johns Hopkins University — presented buyers with several choices, including a vacant home with no furniture, a home with “ugly” furnishings and one with “upscale” furniture, as well as properties with neutral and colored wall treatments. Buyers offered about the same prices, $200,000, for the home, regardless of its appearance. Staging alone is not enough to result in a higher selling price, the authors concluded.

Michael Seiler says good furnishings and neutral wall colors improved the sense of livability and, similar to RESA’s own study, could contribute to selling a home faster, but the monetary benefits were only indirect, at best. “I’m not about to say that staging is a waste, since time is money, [and] the shorter the home is on the market, the more money stays in the seller’s pocket.” Seiler says.

Even RESA’s Brodnax says that if you’re on a budget, you can still do a lot of staging work for under $1,000, especially if you’re willing to do some of the improvement yourself. That includes fixing clogged shower heads or slow drains and leaky toilets, putting down mulch and planting fresh flowers on the exterior, and encouraging (or bribing) your teenage children to keep their rooms clean, as well as removing clutter more generally. It’s also not necessary to stage every room — just the main living areas, such as the living and dining rooms and the master bedroom and bathroom, she said.

In addition, RESA suggests asking the agent to kick in some money for staging. More than half of the real estate agents RESA surveyed said they sometimes offered to pay for staging services (or a portion of the cost) in some cases. Even if the agent won’t pay for the staging, nearly 80% of agents surveyed by RESA paid for a consultation with a stager for their clients (at $300 to $500).

Before you invest in home staging, make sure you do as much improvement work as you can, such as fixing drywall holes and removing carpet stains, as home staging can’t address major cosmetic issues.

“If you’ve repaired a motorcycle on the living-room carpet, all the staging in the world isn’t going to help,” Brodnax says.

Source: Marketwatch

 

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