When preparing to sell your home, there are many steps to be taken. For most sellers, the goal is to sell the home for the highest price to maximize the return. So what can be done to ensure that you get “top dollar” with your sale?

If you are hoping to get the most out of your home sale, it’s very important to have your property looking the best that it can for potential buyers. This means cleaning up the property, decluttering, depersonalizing and taking care of any needed repairs. Aside from these important steps, there is another strategy to consider when listing and that is staging.

So what is staging and how can it help? Staging is a marketing strategy that agents and sellers will use to help showcase the home in the best possible way. It means bringing in furniture, art and accessories to give the home a trendy, clean and cohesive look. The goal is to have the home looking like something out of a magazine and have buyers feeling excited to tour your home when they view the photos. Aside from being more aesthetically pleasing, staging can also help buyers to envision the potential of the home and various rooms. 

Walking through an empty home or worse, one cluttered with a seller’s belongings, many buyers struggle to see past potential negatives or deficiencies with the property. Instead of focusing on the home itself, they may be turned off by the sellers furniture, belongings, clutter, etc. Buyers may also have a hard time envisioning themselves using and enjoying the space. Where will I put my TV? Would a king size bed fit in this bedroom? How would you arrange this family room? These are all examples of questions that buyers sometimes have when touring homes. A staged property, with nicely arranged furniture and accessories, will help these buyers to picture what the space could look like and how it could be used to help overcome any questions or reservations that a buyer may have about the space and home.

How much can staging affect your bottom line when it comes to selling? Depending on the price point of the home, staging could mean the difference of anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. When working with an experienced agent team and stager, it’s almost a guarantee that a staged property will sell for more than the same home not staged.

While we don’t typically get the opportunity to try multiple strategies when listing a home, we recently sold a property that was the perfect example of how staging can help to sell a home for more, and also faster.

The home was located on Las Alturas Terrace in the Valencia Park neighborhood of San Diego. When meeting with the sellers, we discussed different listing and marketing strategies, and the various pros and cons of them. We discussed staging with them, and at the time, they opted not to stage and to list the property with their furniture and with them living in the home.

In this particular example, the seller’s furniture was objectively not bad and the home still showed well. We listed the home in early October for $675,000. To add some additional context around the market at this time, this was after the market had shifted and interest rates had risen dramatically. Affordability and purchasing power for buyers was a struggle and many homes during this time were having trouble selling with longer time on market and many agents and sellers having to do price reductions.

After 17 days on market, we received a full price offer at $675,000 and the sellers chose to accept. The buyer of the property was a contingent buyer though, meaning that they had to sell their current home in order to purchase the property.

Unfortunately as we were approaching closing, the buyer who was selling their other home had their buyer back out at the last moment. With them losing their buyer and their sale not closing, it meant that they could no longer close on the purchase of our seller’s home on Las Alturas, and everything fell apart when we should have been closing.

For our sellers, they were left in an unfortunate situation having already moved out of the home and not having the sale close. Obviously this was a stressful situation for our sellers, but it was a situation that we were determined to help them out of as best we could.

With the sellers now being out of the home and our team having to effectively “start over”, we circled back to the staging conversation with the sellers. This time they were open to taking this approach and we quickly got the property staged, professionally cleaned, and had all new listing photos taken for marketing.

We relisted the property on December 15th at the same price of $675,000. Again, this was during one of the more challenging periods of the market with high interest rates and also during the holiday season, traditionally the slowest time of the year for real estate.

This time though, we received multiple offers within days of listing and accepted an offer from a buyer for $700,000, $25,000 more than the previous buyer that had just fallen out! Aside from the staging and new photos, the home was the same, and it was arguably an even more challenging market time.

Not only did the sellers end up netting an additional $25,000, the home also sold faster and had much higher interest than our first attempt. For our sellers who had been left in a challenging position with the previous buyer, they were incredibly grateful for the successful results and quick sale.

While we don’t often have the chance to try both staged and unstaged approaches side by side, with this example, it is clear to see how staging the home positively impacted the seller’s sale and bottom line. If you’re considering selling your home and are hoping to achieve “top dollar”, we would strongly recommend utilizing staging.

Are you considering selling? Reach out! We'd love to connect and see how we can help you to maximize your return with our listing strategies and ensure that you have a successful sale.