Home Staging on TV - The Stagers - New HGTV show

July 21, 2008

‘The Stagers’ goes inside the hectic world of professional home stagers as they rush to transform a problem house into a showroom — often in just a few days. Amid the tantrums and turmoil are tips and touch-up ideas you can put to work in your own home.

Take the home staging quiz - what type of home stager are you?

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Shift Happens !

June 14, 2008

Change is constant, and this video captures that fact.

Home Staging is currently changing the real estate landscape, and will be a requirement shortly.

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The secret truth about Home Staging Statistics - 0.4% - the truth is in the numbers.

June 9, 2008

This is a very different post about home staging statistics. These home staging statistics are irrefutable, and highlight the secret little truth about home staging and the real estate industry that no one seems ready to talk frankly about on the record.

The June 2008 edition of the Realtor Association Magazine is received by all Realtors in the United States, and contains a featured article “10 Ways to Make Your House More Salable“.

Surprisingly, this article, read by Realtors nationwide fails to make a single mention of home staging, preferring to focus on the obvious selling preparation tasks ranging from small repairs to better wattage bulbs. If this is the opinion of the real estate industry magazine, is it any wonder that home staging remains in the real estate shadows?

How could this happen? If we leave real estate industry magazines aside, how could the majority of Real Estate Agents still not know about home staging given the numerous HGTV shows on the home staging, the exhaustive marketing by the home staging community and weekly home staging presentations at real estate brokerages nationwide?

Though home staging has been an established practice within the real estate industry, we are surprised to find that less than 10% of South Florida Real Estate Agents that we meet with have ever mentioned the need to stage a home for a faster sale to their home sellers.

To investigate this statistic, we did a little ‘home staging statistics’ research. (Hardly scientific, but enlightening nonetheless.)

SHOW ME THE NUMBERS. How are Real Estate Agents communicating the home staging message to their sellers? Do they simply cut and paste or are they trusted advisors?

A Google internet search for the term “10 Ways to Make Your House More Salable” produced more than 550,000 results.
- Most were real estate agent websites aimed at home sellers nationwide.
We extended search to include the terms “10 Ways to Make Your House More Salable” *and* “home staging”,
- There are 22,000 web page results on real estate agents websites aimed at home sellers.
- Yet when you search for “home staging”, there are 2.3 Million web pages returned.

SO WHAT? WHAT DOES IT MATTER?

Sadly, interpreting the results;

Less than 0.4% of real estate agents believe in updating their website to communicate the importance of home staging to their sellers as one of their top tips on selling a home.
Most simply cut and paste web content they find elsewhere, without improving it to include their value added comments.
Yet, many multiples more claim that they talk about home staging to their clients - hardly convincing.

WHAT DOES THAT NUMBER MEAN TO ME, the real estate agent / the seller?

It means that there will be a lot of unhappy sellers. These sellers are getting less than the level of service they should be getting, and their homes are sitting on the market. There is no commission for an expired listing and unhappy sellers find new agents and are not a good referral source,
Conversely, it means there are a small percentage of real estate agents that are leveraging home staging, selling their listings and have happy sellers.
It means that sellers have had to educate themselves on the home selling process and are seeking out home staging aware real estate agents. Real estate agents need to mention home staging during their listing presentation or sellers will find an agent that does.

From the numbers above, it is clear that home staging has a long way to go before it is adopted by the real estate community at large.

Perhaps this explains why over 75% of our inbound home staging inquiries come from educated home sellers. These sellers have taken the preparation of their home and it’s market presentation upon themselves. This is an increasing trend, and we are happy to refer these sellers to ‘home staging aware’ real estate agents when they request a referral.