How important is staging to selling your Denver home? I firmly believe that it might be the most important single factor you can do to get top dollar for your home. I am always amazed by what a difference staging makes, even with homes that I think show perfectly and don't need a thing done. The major reason is that how a buyer looks at your home is going to be completely different than how you live in your home. Even if your home is Pottery Barn perfect, it may not be presented to the buyer in a way that they can see themselves living there and that is the beauty of staging.
In homes with furniture already in them, staging is usually a pretty simple and painless process. I can't recommend Annette Knutson with It's Showtime Staging highly enough. I seldom will put a new house on the market without Annette spending a couple of hours in the home moving furniture and paintings, suggesting new wall colors or inexpensive pieces that can transform a home in no time. I'm 100% convinced that Annette's staging has netted my sellers thousands of extra dollars over the past few years and is the best money my seller's have ever spent in getting their houses ready for the market.
When the home is vacant, the need for staging is even greater. Sure the upfront costs is much more significant, say a thousand compared to a few hundred, but the return is even greater. This summer, during the peak of the market, I had a charming victorian for sale in the Highlands that was vacant. Amazingly it sat for 2 months without an offer. We were going to lower the price another $10,000 but I was able to convince the seller to stage it instead. Within a week of it being staged, we had 3 offers and it sold for full price. And again this week, a very similar instance.
I have a listing down south that has sat for 45 days now with no offers or real interest. We lowered the price thinking that would help, which it didn't and were going to drop it again until the seller decided to have Annette work her magic. Since we had it staged last week, we have a second showing today with the threat of an offer and all of our feedback went from overpriced, bad location, too much road noise, weird layout to great layout, loved the living room options, priced right, might come back for a second look. It is like buyers are looking at a completely different home and that is why I'm convinced of the power of staging.
Here are some before and after pics. You can see why even our web traffic has increased since the staging took place.
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