Is Home Staging Really Worth it?

You’ve most likely been advised to employ home staging services whenever you’re ready to sell your home to make it more attractive. Getting your home ready for sale in the marketplace can require more than a fresh coat of paint and decent furniture placement.

When prospective buyers come to view your home, you want them to walk in there and picture themselves living in it, you want them to experience that fresh feeling of being in a new home and feeling comfortable like it’s their home. This is where Home Staging comes in. However, personal items around the house could be distracting and bare rooms could come off as cold. Brilliant Home Staging and design might just be the solution you need.

While it sounds perfect to have the expert interior decorators show up and make your home up to date and look its absolute best before putting it on the market, it’s fair if you’re nervous about what it might cost as to whether it’s worth it or not.

In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about home staging to help you get a better idea of whether it’s a good fit for you. We’d walk you through what it is, why and how to do it, home staging tips to save money, and what a home staging breakdown looks like.

What’s Home Staging?

It’s a kind of visual advertising that draws on some of the essentials of interior design. It’s preparing a property – your home – for sale by decorating, furnishing, and sometimes renovating to ensure it’s up to date and looking it’s absolute best.

When real estate agents talk about staging your home, they are referring to a process of making a property ready for sale on the real estate marketplace.

It’s not just rearranging furniture like some might think, contrary to what you might think, it’s about more than preparing the house for sale. Staging is what you do after you’ve decluttered, cleaned, painted; it’s all about dressing the house for the sale.

The purpose of home staging is to make a home desirable to the highest number of prospective buyers.

While it may feel like an extra cost, if you’re striving to compete in a buyer’s market, home staging might be that extra special touch that highlights your home’s best features and make it stand out to those picky house hunters.

During the process of selling your home, buyers tend to notice the difference between an unstaged home and a staged home. But is home staging really worth it? Does the process of home staging yield any tangible (read: monetary) outcome at all?

The simple answer is yes! Brilliant staging makes a notable difference when selling your home – The amazing benefits of home staging are not luxuries you can’t afford, it has the potential to lessen the time your home spends on the market and can lead to higher offers.

If you’re still on the fence, here are some benefits to help you decide.

A quicker and more profitable sale

Just the simple act of decluttering, painting, or making a few repairs to your home can boost the value of your home. Staging your home provides prospective buyers with positive first impressions and can help them better imagine how they can use the space, therefore your home comes across as more valuable.

The end result of staging your home is to get more potential buyers interested in it and when this happens a bidding war can start. Potential buyers that fall in love with your home would be more than willing to pay over the asking price to ensure they get it.

According to a study by the National Association of Realtors in 2017, 29% of sellers’ agents reported an increase of 1 to 5 percent in dollar value offered by the buyers, 21 % an increase of eight to ten percent, and 5% reported an increase of 11 to 15 percent. 5% does not seem like a lot until you realize that 5% of a $400 000 home is $20 000.

Make it easy for potential buyers to envision life in your home

Possibly one of the most used reasons in the debate for staging your home – and for good reason. You want your buyers to better imagine what living there would look like, you want them to see in their minds how they might set up the furniture, even if they might not like the way the home is arranged, it’ll give them ideas to make their own changes.

One big benefit of home staging is the emotional appeal it generates. Persuading a potential client to buy is all about playing on the right images in their minds.

With brilliant home staging, professionals create an atmosphere embellished to use the full potential of the house.

Staging gives the perception of a bigger home

As counterintuitive as it may sound, an empty house tends to look smaller, while a room with furniture feels larger. A vacant room renders no spatial context, while on the contrary, a furnished room allows potential buyers to understand the dimensions of the furniture in proportion with the room size.

If a real estate agent has recommended Home Staging, it’s because evidence has shown that Home Staging is worth the effort. Staged homes sell 88% faster and for about 20% more than non-staged homes which is nothing to scoff at. But just how much does home staging cost?

It’s not logical to put an exact price tag on home staging since there are so many variations but here’s what you should know about the cost to stage a home so you can conclude if hiring a professional home stage is worth the investment for you.

Should you stage the home yourself?

Of course, you might have an eye for decorating or you possibly already own elegant home accessories. If so you might be able to duplicate the work of a home stager and save some fees, here are some ideas to help you sell your home quickly.

But like any of the responsibilities involved in preparing your home for sale and finally selling your home, you’d need to be sure as to whether staging your house yourself is worth the effort and time.

Although your house might be in pretty good shape, you’ll inescapably find yourself working on basic things like shopping for matching table lights, finding the perfect doormat, finding and hiring workers, and so on.

The time you’d spend on all these tasks adds up, whereas hiring a home stager implies that most of it would occur like magic whilst you give attention to the more important stuff on your plate.

The cost of home staging by an expert – someone with a great track record and who comes highly recommended can mean more money in the bank for you. The decision is yours of course.

If Home staging helps you sell your home faster and lessens its time in the real estate market so people don’t start wondering what’s wrong with it, If it saves you months of carrying expenses, If it brings in higher offers well above your asking price then your money is well spent.

Brilliant Staging and design is the heart and soul of Seattle, Everett, Bellevue, and Northwestern Washington’s home staging and Design.