AOL Real Estate: Before and After Home Staging

May 7, 2007

I have written several articles about preparing your home for sale; from providing an attractive curb appeal to freshening the interior with paint and new carpets. Making your home more desirable to potential buyers in this market is essential to be competitive. Home staging has become a robust sub business to the real estate industry. Staging is NOT interior decorating. It is about using what you have and adding (perhaps) a dash of inexpensive decorator items to make you home more inviting and and appear to be more spacious. It is NOT about the way you and I would necessarily live in our homes. It is about making an emotional connection with the potential buyer. Here are some excerpts from AOL Real Estate's Stager Gallery providing a series of before and after pictures to drive home the point (titles are links): Can you guess what is in this container and what it may have to do with the shelving? → →

A Professional Home Stager at Work
What does it take to sell a home quickly these days? You might need something called home staging. The goal is to create a home interior that looks brighter, bigger and more inviting to potential buyers.

Browse these before and after shots and see how one professional stager uses simple techniques to enhance a home's appearance.

Unclutter a Messy Room
BEFORE STAGING: Big or small, messes make it difficult for buyers to imagine living there. Always leave your home spotless so buyers see your home at its best. When they view other houses with clutter, your place will stand out as the bright spot.

...and so on. There is a series of 18 pictures showing before and after each staging tip.

To some of us, staging is just using a little common sense with an artistic eye. For those of us that are artistically challenged (or common sense challenged for that matter), a professional, accredited stager can be hired to help us out. I know many agents that provide a quantity of staging help to their listing clients as part of their services. I include it as an option when designing a selling plan for my clients. Many new home builders are now offering home sale assistance (including staging and virtual tours for marketing) to their buyers that are having difficulty selling their homes to buy the new one.

Speaking of new home builders, model homes are lavishly decorated to make that emotional connection to buyers: I can live in this home, it's warm, cozy, friendly and inviting. Same principle with staging without the lavish expense.

My opinion of the AOL presentation
What I find helpful in this AOL presentation is the quality of the photos, the before and after shots and the short and to the point descriptions of the transformations. Great visual story. What is lacking is any conclusion about cost (or range of cost) or the return on investment. As a consumer, I am convinced that staging can be helpful but, I also want to know how it impacts my wallet. I'd also like to see references to real stagers that I could contact (could this be ad revenue?). The other thing that I believe is very distracting are the constant ads for home mortgages. I know AOL is shifting their business model to be ad revenue driven but, it is still distracting. I am probably tainted by real estate Blogs that don't have heavy advertising. I'd venture to say maybe 20 to 25% of the screen space are ads, 30% is the featured content and the remainder consists of a plethora of links to other AOL content. Lastly, this particular piece does not have a reference to an author that might add credibility to the staging proposition. Others we will feature do have named authors.

So there you have it. Our first AOL Real Estate presentation and my short critique. Visit the article on AOL and then come back and provide your comments.

Note: The reproduction of AOL copyright material is pre-approved by AOL.

After Thoughts:
Here are links to stagers I know:
We Prep Homes
StagedRite
and, more helpful references...
Design and Staging Directory
StagedHomes.com
six ELEMENTS
nest
Hart and Associates
HOLTmodern
Real Estaging
DEKORA

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