Should Sellers Stage A Vacant Property?
Potential buyers need to be able to picture themselves living in a home — and that's hard to accomplish when they're staring at empty rooms.
Denise Sleeper, Feb 6 2020
Owner of Delta Home Staging & Redesign
The answer is 100% yes!!! Vacant homes typically take twice as long to sell and can go for even less than un-staged occupied homes. So why is that? There are a number of reasons, but the bottom line is: People don’t buy houses, they buy homes. Potential buyers need to be able to picture themselves living in a home — and that's hard to accomplish when they're staring at empty rooms.
Here are 6 reasons why “vacant doesn’t make it”:
Buyers tend to see flaws vs features
When a room is empty your eyes have no obvious resting place, so buyers might see a minor flaw in the room. This is all it takes to turn a buyer off from buying. Staging does not cover up problems, but instead a trained home stager can have buyers looking at the room in its entirety to see the beautiful features and potential.
The room will feel & look dark
An empty room can feel dark – Home staging focuses on the proper lighting, the right location for lighting, the right paint and added in reflective accessories to add the necessary brightness.
It’s hard to visualize the size of the room & the layout of the furniture
Only 10% of people can visualize the potential in a space. Empty rooms look smaller so it’s hard for most people to imagine what furniture will fit or where to position it, as there is no frame of reference. Without furniture there is no frame of reference, making it difficult for buyers to tell the scale and size of the room. Home staging provides the right size furniture and placement so buyers can visualize the potential.
Rooms will feel cold and impersonal
An empty room typically feels cold and impersonal. When selling your home, you want future buyers to have an “ah hah” moment so they can visualize themselves living there. Home staging provides that appropriate colours and textures to give warmth to a room
You may not stand out from the competition
A staged home will stand out amongst all other properties on the market generating higher buyer interest and traffic.
Photos will not show the potential
97% of buyers look online when buying a home, so their first impression is your listing photo. An empty space in a photo is even harder to visualize than in person. If a future buyer is not impressed by the photos online, then they will skip over the property and perhaps miss out on their ideal home.
Bottom line: Vacant properties need to have home staging to appeal to future buyers and maximize the selling potential. Home staging creates the idea of a lifestyle where buyers can see themselves living in your beautiful space.
At the end of the day, people buy homes and not houses.