Anyone thinking home staging is a fringe service practiced almost exclusively in California, and only slowly spreading to other states or provinces, guess again!
There's a need for staging anywhere there are:
- occupied homes to sell
- vacant homes to sell
- people needing to move who can't agree on how to present their homes
- prospective buyers who can't look paste ugly, disorganized or vacant rooms
- homeowners with more money than taste
- homeowners overwhelmed by the clutter in their lives
- builders with too much inventory
- people who want to sell their homes faster without slashing their price below market value
So, what's the world's most remote country? New Zealand!
It is over 4,000 miles away from anywhere else — the closest place being Australia across the Tasman Sea. Imagine living where the only other land to the south is Antarctica and to the north is New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga! New Zealand's largest land mass is the South Island, shown here, which is home to the Southern Alps.
So, how do I know home staging has made it's way to New Zealand?
Because there are already two Staging Diva Graduates in New Zealand.
The country is a great place to build a staging business. It has a population of over 4 million and enjoys a high standard of living. The average house price in Auckland in May of this year was NZD 541,570 (about USD 325,000) -- a whopping 17% increase from last year!
If you're skeptical that staging works in a hot market, you should know that I started my staging company, Six Elements Inc. in the hot Toronto market in the fall of 2002. Toronto is one of the most expensive real estate markets in North America and I focus on the hottest neighborhoods where it's not unusual for homes to sell in days with multiple offers.
Savvy sellers realize that if a home is well-staged it might attract 10 or 15 bidders instead of the 2 or 3 that they might have had without staging. Naturally the final selling price is determined more by the number of offers than the initial asking price. In many neighborhoods, staging has become an accepted part of what you do before listing -- that's not how it was when I started!
Learn more about why staging works in both fast and slow real estate markets.
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging
Debra Gould has trained over 600 others in the US, Canada, Australia, England, Portugal, Italy, South Africa, Wales and New Zealand to start and grow their own house staging businesses. She brings a unique perspective to training and the business of home staging, based on her experience of growing her own home staging company from scratch (not as a sideline to selling real estate), being a self-supporting entrepreneur since 1989 and having her MBA in Marketing.
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