I find it interesting reading all the blogs on this terrific site about what agents are looking for when it comes to staging and and what stagers want to offer agents when it comes to selling. But perhaps throughout this process we need to keep perpsective on what the seller in the middle wants too.
These are the people that are going through the personal stress of selling a home. They are the financial stakeholders, the emotional stakeholders and the ones with the most (or hopefully least) to lose during this process. These are the people that decide on which agent to select to sell their home and whether to contract the service of a stager in their area.
If this is not enough, the seller goes through the intrusion of having strangers walk through their house and pick apart the way they live, the way they have styled their house, their furnishings and their general decor while doing an inspection. Wow, what a reality shock! Then you have this person, this 'stager' come through your house to tell you how it can improved and made to look even better. Even better than what? This is my home and this is where I have lived for the last XYZ years. There is NOTHING wrong with it.
This is where our diplomatic skills as a quality stager come into play. It is important to realise the opportunity we have to contribute to these people's lives, the positive impact we can have on helping them Shift forward, quite literally (sorry, bad play on words). We can reduce the burden, increase the excitement and make the transition from their current home to their new one so much easier. Having a stager come into a property also starts to reduce the personal attachment to a property. Once we have done the work it looks less like the way they lived and slowly assists to separate them from the property, educating them that they are the custodians of the property now. We can highlight the benefits, place less emphasis on the negatives (without hiding them of course) and create a completely welcoming environment that the home owner can then claim as their own, as their lifestyle.
I have so been surprised in my dealings with clients on their reaction to work once undertaken as part of the home staging process. Some clients are simply not aware of the process and certainly not able to visualise the outcomes, but want that all important wow factor in their home in order to progress the sale. The reward in having the client see the property with new eyes and seeing the possibilities certainly makes the job worthwhile. These are people who are blinded by the time they have spent in property and don't see the obvious things we with trained eyes do.
At the end of the day we provide a quality service with so many benefits across the emotional spectrum. We just need to keeping thinking about the excitement we can offer the people who pay our services and the effect we will have on their lives.
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