I was lucky to attend the first annual Real Estate Staging Association's national conference last week in Las Vegas. Shell Brodnax, President of RESA, has done an amazing job bringing together a really fractured industry and getting everyone to join forces to think about where the industry goes. The conference was an overwhelming flood of information ideas and food for thought.
The most memorable quote that I heard was 'Other home stagers are not your compeition. Homeowners and Realtors who do not use a home stager to sell a home are your real competition."
I don't think I have ever heard a truer statement!
The statistical evidence for using a home staging company is huge: Fully staged homes sell faster and for higher prices. Using a staging company cuts your time to sell in half and can make your home far less vunerable to low-ball offers, garnering as much as a 15% higher sales price.
Equally overwhelming are how few Realtors and homeowners use a staging company to help sell a home. By purely unscientific measures, as little as 4-5% of the homes sold in the country employ a home stager of some sort.
That's not even a drop in the bucket!
Career builder listed home staging as the top emerging career and a career to watch for this decade. There is no doubt that the numbers of staged homes will increase dramatically this decade and from its humble start, the industry will evolve to the point where you need two professionals to successfully stage a home: a Realtor and a Home Stager.
My thanks to Shell Brodnax for pulling the industry together so we can all take this journey together by focusing all our efforts on our real competition: homeowners and Realtors who don't use a home staging company.
Thomas Scott
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