Selling You on Staging

Selling your home for its maximum value is always our goal. 

There are a number of ways for us to reach that value, and everyone of them involves making sure your home is presented to the market in its best possible light. This is why we encourage staging. 

Naturally, our biggest struggle when it comes to designing a home for the market is that it needs to have as close to a universal appeal as possible, which tends to require removing personal items and design themes that you feel make your house what it is. 

Look, we understand—it’s not easy to detach yourself from something you’ve worked so hard to create, and in many cases, actually build, remodel and makeover. Physical effort often translates into emotional connections. What we ask is that you pack only the stuff but keep the memories where they are. Remind yourself that the hardest part was the decision to sell, and that the reward you received over the years of ownership will soon come all over again. 

Staging is a proven tactic for better sales, and the numbers are on point: the National Association of Realtors reports that 82 percent of buyers’ agents said staging a home made it easier for a buyer to visualize the property as a future home, and 47 percent said home staging had an impact on most buyers’ view of the home. It’s even more critical in softer markets when buyers have more choice, a market we think may be upon us in the near future. 

Overall, we believe firmly that less is more. Use space to communicate the home’s appeal, encouraging people to think about what they would put there, how they would activate an empty corner of a great room or highlight a window bench. 

Remember that staging is dual purpose, it’s for in-person showings and photography. Buyers will access the listing online before they physically visit, so it’s critical for the two experiences to meld into a single, cohesive reaction. We’ll design a room according to where photos will do the most good in our marketing efforts.

If we need to paint, neutral color palettes rule the day, and bold swaths of complementary tones are used to pull the eye around the room. Nothing will be overdone. And in terms of decor, we’ll adjust pictures, artwork and other physical aesthetics into positions where they compliment the goal of getting the home sold, this includes furniture, too. 

Staging has little to do with what you’ve done with your home and everything to do with trying to design for a mass public. We don’t know what kind of buyers will visit the home, so we have to create a look and feel that will have the best odds of appealing to a wide audience while integrating what we know about current home decor and interior design trends. 

Above all else, know that your house is in good hands with us, and that we’ll work with you to ensure what the market sees is what you would want to see when touring the next place you call home.       

Questions about staging? Concerns? Just want to talk? Contact us. My team at The Abbey Collection is here to ensure you're comfortable and happy throughout the buying and selling process.