When a professional home stager first walks through the door, they have already come to a few conclusions about your property. So many factors go into determining what kind of appeal a listing has and who it appeals to, but the foremost is location. Where your listing is located within a city – the specific neighborhood, school zone, nearby amenities, the look and size of the lot – will have a huge influence on a buyers’ perception of the property.
As home stagers, it’s our job to see these things first and use them to figure out how best to market your listing. Once we’re actually inside the house itself, we’ll continue to evaluate what we see and how well it fits with the buyer profile we’re building. Let’s talk about a few of the characteristics that tend to shape our approach the most:
Overall Layout
Obviously, square footage and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms are typically the first thing a buyer looks at on your listing. But where those bedrooms and bathrooms are located and the relative size of each room is important too. It’s hard for buyers to get a sense of those things without seeing a property for themselves.
Layout plays such a crucial role in determining how buyers would actually live in the home. When buyers see your house in person, they will likely have preferences for which bedrooms are upstairs versus downstairs based on whether they have kids or in-laws living with them. Similarly, the number and size of entertainment spaces will determine whether the property would be more attractive to millennial buyers or to retirees.
Architectural Style
The style and age of your listing will certainly influence which generation an interested buyer would likely fall into. Many flippers or young couples looking to renovate would happily buy an outdated home, but to appeal to those kinds of buyers, you would need to stage differently than you would to the kind of buyer who would be more likely to appreciate the property’s history.
Generally speaking, you can sell a home’s historical value as a feature, rather than a flaw, more easily with luxury properties than with homes on the lower end of the market. And even if you are styling the home to appeal to a younger demographic, you can still incorporate elements and colors from the home’s current style to make the home feel cohesive.
Existing Investments
Staging is all about increasing the value buyers see in your listing. That makes accentuating investments the previous owners or builders made in the home a priority. In an empty or haphazardly furnished room, luxury features like marble countertops and stone fireplaces don’t stand out the way they should. Stagers use design to naturally draw the eye towards these high-investment fixtures as you step into the room.
Luxury Amenities
This is a little different than simply highlighting the significant investments already made on the property. Luxury buyers are looking for properties that have it all – spaces to work, workout, entertain, get their hair done and even have a spa day. Homes that already have amenities like this, a Zen garden, pool, or home theater make a stagers job easy. But other properties require more artful staging to show the potential that extra rooms could actually have for a potential buyer. Showing this potential is especially important for luxury properties.
Your Stager Wants You to Get the Most Out of Your Listing
Whether you are a regular homeowner, builder, flipper, or Realtor, bringing in someone to critique your listing can be scary. But it’s not our job to judge. It’s our job to advise and to market your property to the people who will love it the most.