Home staging is about creating great first impressions as well as memorable ones. Home buyers are looking at larger numbers of homes thanks to increased use of the internet. Buyers now have access to what traditionally was the domain of the Realtors only - the MLS. Now potential buyers can search through hundreds of homes using sophisticated filtering tags to narrow their search. So, unlike the past, when they had to rely solely on their realtor to steer them to a home or to laboriously search through a local 'real estate for sale' listings magazine, they now have the ability to see all the homes in their area that match their desired criteria in a matter of minutes. This means that, in some very real sense, even without factoring in changing market conditions, there is now greatly increased competition for home sales. If I can look at all the 4 bedroom, 3 car garage, 2.5 bath, two story homes in my area with a few clicks, then it stands to reason that there is more competition than there used to be when my agent might pick out three or four homes to take me to see or I found an equal number in the magazines that I wanted to tour. Now, instead of viewing a relatively limited number of properties, I can easily look at hundreds.

Although this is not new information, judging from the poor quality of many realtors' internet photos combined with the failure to properly prepare and professionally stage many of these homes, it would appear that there are large numbers of home sellers and realtors who have, perhaps, not fully grasped the implications of this shift.

We have been joking (see "Artfully Creative" Property Descriptions  by Gina Dougherty) about the tired and tiresome descriptions that realtors use in these magazines and here I have to say a word to defend our realtor friends- I can't imagine how boring it must be for them to have to come up with catchy phrases to describe property to try to make them stand out from the crowd in these offerings. It would be so much easier if realtors had great looking staged homes so they did not have to rely on catchy phrasing that becomes tired and worn-out.

The best way to make properties stand out on the Internet is to first properly stage and prepare them for sale and then take great photos of them to show internet surfers. I just looked at some listings of a successful agent in my area, who understands internet marketing very well, judging by the quality of her web site, and, yet, one of her listings had photos of a bedroom where the bed was not even made up. It looked like someone had just gotten up from sleeping there or like a recently vacated hotel room!

I know this post is a bit of a repeat of what we have been saying this past few weeks but I felt I needed to say it again in a slightly different way. Staging a home just makes sense as part of the overall marketing plan for selling real estate if for no other reason than the increased use of the internet. The need for excellent, enticing, inviting, and exciting photos for the internet market are reason enough to professionally stage a home.

See these related articles which are two of my favorites:

Top 10 Ugly Listing Photo "Trends" That Need to Go With 2006 by Cindy Lin

The Most Effective Use of Your Marketing Budget  by Kimberly Wester