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Don’t Fall for Staging

Posted by Johnine Larsen on December 13, 2016
| Buyers, General Interest, Personal News and Life Updates, Sellers
| 0

livingroom

Staging sells. If you’re listing a home, find someone who can professionally stage and arrange your house. Your bank account will thank you.

If you’re buying a home: don’t get fooled! Staging looks great, but none of that furniture stays in the house. Staging means jack diddly when it homes to a home’s actual investment potential.

Take this story, for instance. The other day, one of my clients put in an offer on a two-bed, one-bath house that was listed at $785,000. It was a cute home with an unfinished basement, but the kitchen wasn’t redone, and it was in the Central District, between Cherry and Yeller. Not a hot area. Even so, I knew that house would escalate well past its $785,000 listing price.

Why? Staging.

The house looked great on the inside, and in this market, buyers are desperate, and desperation means people make hasty, emotional decisions.

That house ended up selling for more than $856,000 with no contingencies. A cute home, sure, but a $856k cute home? No way. And the fancy staging, of course, didn’t even stay.

The solution to superficial staging appeal like that is an honest, experienced real estate agent. We can look past the top layers and the first impressions to discover a house’s true worth. How’s the location? How’s the structural value? How much investment potential does this home really have? Those are the questions you need to ask, and those are the questions I’ve been answering for twenty-five years.

I keep my clients from making bad investments, because there’s nothing worse than wasting the biggest investment of your life and getting stuck in a house you can’t sell.

 

As for the listing side of things… I handle staging for all my clients (I do it free), because after twenty-five years of this, I can tell you: Staging works. 

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