Home staging: how to make your property stand out from other listings on the market

While browsing listings of flats and houses for sale, you have surely come across advertisements that may have been interestingly written, but whose photographs completely put you off the property. As we all know, appearance is half the battle, in trade in general as well as in selling property. That is why, to make your property attractive to clients and help it stand out from other listings, it is worth investing in home staging.

What is home staging?

The history of home staging goes back to the 1970s, when it was noticed in the United States that flats should be sold like products, and products find the most buyers when they are nicely packaged and presented. This is how home staging came about; in short, it involves preparing a property properly for sale or letting. Depending on needs, home staging may involve larger renovation work, such as stripping old wallpaper, skimming the walls and painting, as well as simple measures consisting mainly of minor tidying and the depersonalisation of the flat or house. What matters most is that the resulting effect is attractive to the buyer.

Reducing home staging purely and simply to decorating is a considerable oversimplification. The service often includes scent marketing, known as aromamarketing, which involves scenting the rooms of the property so that the potential buyer associates it with something pleasant. When selling a house or flat, we are talking not about incense or harsh air fresheners, but about the smell of baking or the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. For a potential buyer, this kind of sensation should evoke the warmth of the family hearth. Remember that this also brings a greater willingness to negotiate.

Results

With home staging you can not only increase the value of a property by as much as 10 to 25%, but also shorten the time to sale by at least 40%. Importantly, flats and houses are often sold almost immediately after home staging has been carried out.

What makes listings with home staging chosen more readily than the rest? First of all, the home stager's task is to make properties seem more spacious and show no trace of use – most often it is enough to rearrange or remove a few pieces of furniture, conceal defects and bring to the fore what is most attractive about the property. Because home staging does not always involve costly renovation work, investing in it is often the cheapest way to make your property stand out from other listings on the market.

Are you looking for professionals who will easily make potential clients fight for your property? Get in touch with our experts!