Staging Improves the Bottom Line Even in a Hot Market

We’ve got a strong seller’s market in metro Denver at the moment. Houses sell quickly and often with multiple buyers fighting to be the successful bidder.

This raises a question: Is it worth taking any time and effort to get a house in tip-top showing condition – to do what agents call “staging”?

Isn’t a house going to sell even if it looks like teenagers had a rave in it the night before while the parents were out of town?

Sure. The house will sell. If that’s your definition of success, then staging is not important. However, even in this market, staging is going to repay itself many times over. You will sell at a higher net price with a savvy approach to pre-sale preparation.

First, let’s get clear on what we mean by staging.

At one end of the spectrum, staging can be a no-cost/low-cost effort that involves rearranging furniture, adding accessories to rooms and doing a thorough cleaning and de-cluttering. It can also involve bringing rented furniture into a vacant property. In some cases, staging may include spending money on extensive renovations.

Next, let’s consider what we mean when we ask if staging “works”. We believe there will never be scientific proof that staging results in a higher sales price.

For scientific proof, you’d have to have many pairs of completely identical properties and put them on the market at the same time with one staged and the other un-staged. A double-blind study of staging is probably never going to exist.

While scientific proof is unlikely, it’s not the only kind of proof available. We also have the legal proof option. Evidence is presented in courtrooms daily and juries give verdicts that such and such happened.

Those juries might do so based on the fairly weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard or on the stricter standard of “clear and convincing evidence” or on the most stringent standard of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”.

We believe that the proof for the effectiveness of staging rises to the highest standard – “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”. We can tell you tons of stories, here is just one that happened recently.

An agent in our office was helping a seller with the sale of a town-home. There were ten sales of very similar units in the complex over the preceding 60 days. Three of them were vacant and had sold at an average price of $210,635. The other seven were occupied and had sold at an average price of $217,105k. It sure appears that lack of staging on the vacant properties was holding down their prices by about $6,000. That seems like pretty convincing evidence that lack of staging was holding the three vacant properties down.

The agent in our office facilitated full staging furniture for this 3-bedroom townhome that cost the seller a bit less than $900. The town-home sold with competing offers within the first 72 hours of coming on the market at the $216k mark, netting the seller an additional 2% over what would have likely happened with no staging.

The moral of the story: Good agents will discuss staging with you and will add value to your real estate transaction by helping you decide what level of staging produces the highest net price for you with the least out-of-pocket cost and effort. This is just one way that a competent agent increases your bottom line.