Home staging only one piece in the puzzle of a real estate sale

Summary

Expert home stager, Debra Gould, explains how home staging is only one piece in the puzzle of a successful real estate sale and gives advice to home stagers worried about their responsibility if a house they’ve staged does not sell.

Home staging only one piece in the puzzle of a real estate sale

While home stagers play an important role in the real estate world by ensuring a house is decorated to appeal to potential buyers, they are still only one piece of a very large puzzle.

Some home stagers, especially new ones, worry their clients will blame them if the house they staged doesn’t sell. This is really more of a problem for the real estate agent than the home stager and that’s who the home seller will be looking to for answers.

Home stagers decorate the house to sell, but there are several factors that the real estate agent is in control of including:

• pricing the property correctly
• running ads
• developing effective feature sheets
• showcasing the property on MLS and other sites
• hosting open houses
• booking showings
• marketing it to other real estate agents

If done poorly, these crucial components may stand in the way of a sale, no matter how well the property is staged.

Home stagers “package” a product for the real estate agent to sell, but after that, it’s up to them, and the home seller who must agree to the right selling price and keep the house in showing ready condition.

Home staging expert, Debra Gould advises that home stagers stay away from making any specific guarantees to a home seller about how many days the house will take to sell or at what price. “That would be irresponsible because of the many factors involved in how quickly a house will sell.”

Home stagers can do an amazing staging job, but have no idea what shape the house will remain in during showings. Or, the listing agent might be ineffective in the way they’re trying to market the property. The sellers might be stuck on getting a certain price and impossible to negotiate with. There might be six offers but they’re all rejected for a variety of reasons.

Debra Gould, founder of the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program says, “I once staged a 4 bedroom home, but I couldn’t change the fact that it was located on a busy corner or that it was a 1970s house on a street where everything else had been torn down and replaced with modern homes. Staged or not, the inherent drawbacks of the location and age of the house, relative to its neighbors, needed to be factored into the asking price to create an appealing package for potential buyers.”

She adds, “Unfortunately, the homeowner thought because all the other houses on her street were selling for millions of dollars, hers should be priced $100,000 over what it was worth. It didn’t sell because no amount of home staging could fix the fundamental problems with this overpriced home.”

About the author

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses.