You all have encountered them…the cluttered or outdated homestead. As you know it’s hard for home owners to detach themselves from their homes. And it’s often even harder for you as the realtor to risk offending your client or losing the listing altogether. A home stager has a trained eye for dealing with clutter, and let’s face it, we can all agree that clutter eats equity, and therefore also your commissions.
As real estate agents, your time is money. Sure, you could donate your time to helping your client rearrange their furniture, helping them de-clutter, choose paint colours, decide whether to move the office into different room, running from store to store and buying accessories if required….but it’s a significant amount of time you could be using drumming up new business, contacting old clients, catching up on marketing efforts or paperwork. And not to mention the cost out of your pocket to buy accessories, etc.
Math time…if you listed four homes this month and spend an average of eight hours (I’m being generous here) on each one of them, that adds up to 32 hours, or fo9ur entire working days. How many homes could you have shown in four days, how many follow-up calls to old clients could you have made, how many hours could you have spent on marketing?
What does a home staging consultation entail – for me I like to have a hands on approach during the consultation. I find that if as many suggestions are made during the consult as possible, then clients buy in more. Just walking through the home telling clients what needs to be changed doesn’t always convince them. Making changes right before their eyes allows them to see, and most often buy into the suggestion. If there’s stuff for the homeowner to do afterwards they are much more apt to go along with the recommendations after seeing some changes.
It’s amazing the changes that can happen in two hours. Savvy realtors and home owners are enlisting home stagers to have their homes stand out amongst the competition, and to reduce the need for price reductions. Let a home stager help you maximize your time and your return on investment.
