Staging not a "Last Resort"

I did a listing presentation last month for a couple that had called me after hearing of my sucess in staging & selling homes quickly. Their home had been on the market in 2007 for about 7 months at a pretty reasonable price with no serious interest.

When I met with them, it became obvious to me why their home was not selling. There were pepto-bismal pink, grass green and purple bedrooms, a fire-truck red bathroom and the dining room (which was actually rather large) was so scattered with toys you couldn't walk through it (it had no dining room furniture in it.) 

We talked about the benefits of staging and how there were many homes for sale nearby within the same general price range as their home. With all that competition from homes that don't need as much work, their home wasn't coming across as having anything special to offer.

Now, you would have thought I would be their dream agent since I offer staging services free to my clients (including, when necessary, helping them paint) but in the end, they chose another agent because they thought staging would be "too much trouble". (It's hard sometimes for clients to separate me from my staging service -- I could have listed it "as is" like anyone else, but I preferred to help them stage it properly first since I knew it would make it more likely to sell).

The "inconvenience" of staging lasts only a short time -- usually a few days. The "inconvenience" of keeping your home ready to show for month and months ends up being far more intrusive, and many sellers get tired enough of it that after a couple of months, they start easing up -- they leave dirty dishes in the sink, the beds don't get made and toys start appearing everywhere. If they would have bitten the bullet and worked with me a few days, we may very well have sold their house by now.

Now, human nature being what it is, I understand that we'd all rather get more and do less, but they had already discovered that this approach hadn't worked for them. And that's part of my frustration: people seem to understand that the market's "tough" but for some reason, they don't seem to understand that it applies to them and their homes! With the huge amounts of inventory available right now, homes that need excessive painting (and don't show buyers how they can be utilized) just sit on the market, as their home is doing now.

If people wait to stage their homes until they've exhausted all other options, they're selling themselves (and their homes) short, (no pun intended). A home that's been on the market 6 months will, as we all know, start to get a stigma and rushing in at the last moment with fantastic staging can only undo so much of that. The bulk of the current buyers who were interested in this type of home have already looked at it and rejected it, so there's a much smaller pool of buyers to appeal to if sellers wait to stage their homes "if it doesn't sell the way it is". I can make a home much more appealing but I can't create a whole new pool of buyers to appeal to!

Now, in all honesty, the agent they chose is a decent agent who is doing all the "standard" agent things -- putting a sign in their yard, entering decent photos in the MLS, putting an ad in the paper and holding an occasional open house. But their home has been on the market a month now with no takers, and I suspect it will stay there for months to come. Not because it's over-priced -- the other agent listed it at the exact same price I suggested -- but because in this market, a standard home priced at fair market value will likely sit unless it stands out in some way.

In the meantime, I'm working to stage two other properties that I believe will sell relatively quickly because they're both going to be priced properly and staged properly. And the sellers who ended up not going with me? They've decided that if their home doesn't sell within the next few months, they're going to call me and have me help them stage their house.