The Pros and Cons of Staging

There have been mixed reviews about “staging”-designing your property to appeal to potential buyers-and whether or not it is as beneficial as people make it out to be. At Dalin Financial, we have seen many successes from staging, but for you to see if it’s going to be beneficial for you, we have compiled a list of the pros and cons of staging to provide a better understanding if staging will help sell your property.

First, we’ll start out with the pros of staging:

• Staging gives your home a cleaner, more polished look. It gives the buyer an idea of what it would be like to live there and makes it more attractive. Potential buyers will have an easier time seeing themselves living in your home compared to a bland, empty home.
• Empty spaces tend to look much larger than ones filled with furniture and decor. With the help of staging, potential buyers can get better sense of how much space they are working with.
• Having statement decor pieces can help potential buyers remember your home. That one piece can assist them in easily narrowing down what houses they liked, and therefore will shorten their selection process.
• Since staging can be an expensive option, there is a substitution known as “virtual staging”, this is when you pay a graphic designer a few hundred dollars to digitally create a staged home for buyers to view on the internet.
• Lastly, your main goal of staging is to make a lasting impression on viewers/potential buyers so that they will want to buy your home. A nicely decorated home, along with adding food and drinks at the open house for ambiance can be very appealing, therefore making it easier to create that lasting impression that you seek.

Now that we’ve covered the pros, we will move on to the cons of staging a property:

• Staging can take a huge toll on your wallet. Some staging companies ask for $500-$1000 from your personal finances just to stage your home. If it isn’t successful, you are now out of money that you cannot recoup. There are many levels of pricing for using a staging service, and the number of rooms and the level of quality all play in the cost.
• Staging can also get in the way of the buyers imagination, which takes away from their personal vision of the what the home could be. For example. if you have a statement color throughout the house that a potential buyer hates, it will be hard for them to envision themselves living in that space.
• Sometimes staging can be taken overboard, and it can make the buyers feel as if the house cannot really be lived in. This makes it difficult for the buyers to see what they want the house to be like because it is full of things belonging to someone else.
• Staging can be very time consuming. If your home was just put on the market and is in a prime location, it may not be worth the investment to stage the home. Sometimes, just the right price and location alone can sell the property.

When deciding whether or not staging is right for you, make sure you remember not to go overboard. It is important to leave enough space open for the buyers to imagine how they can decorate the house for themselves. Also remember to take every aspect into consideration before you decide to stage or not, it will help you to make the best decision for selling your home!