Table of Contents
- The Benefits of Home Staging
- 4 Costly, Common Home Staging Mistakes
- Virtual Staging to the Rescue!
- Let AgentUp Help You Avoid Home Staging Mistakes
Home staging is a valuable real estate marketing tool, making a property look its best while helping buyers visualize themselves living in the home.
Home staging can help sell a home fast and for a higher price. But common home staging mistakes can also harm a sale.
In this article, we’ll discuss common home staging mistakes and how to avoid them.
But first, let’s understand why home staging is so important!
The Benefits of Home Staging
Home staging involves carefully preparing a home for sale to enhance its appeal to potential buyers.
This process often entails working on the existing furnishings and decor and, in some cases, renovating to maximize the property’s attractiveness.
Typically, homeowners opt to enlist the services of a professional home stager to undertake this task before officially listing their property.
These experts either work with the existing furniture and decor items or acquire new ones through rental, all to accentuate the property’s most desirable features.
Home staging professionals then get to work, adjusting each room’s layout and design elements to create an environment that resonates with prospective buyers. They may also do remodeling and repair projects if necessary.
When done right, home staging has a positive impact on real estate sales, as evidenced by recent statistics:
- Staged homes tend to sell 75% faster than their non-staged counterparts
- An impressive 83% of staged properties fetch the asking price or even exceed it
Real estate sales experts turn to home staging for various reasons, including:
- Elevating the visual and curb appeal of a property
- Removing personal items and clutter to help prospective buyers envision themselves residing in the home
- Demonstrating a property’s untapped potential, which can be challenging to perceive when confronted with empty or disorganized rooms
As you can see, traditional staging methods have several potential benefits.
However, home staging is not with risks. Let’s explore 4 common home staging mistakes and how they harm sales.
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4 Costly, Common Home Staging Mistakes
While often effective, home staging can sometimes go wrong due to unfortunate errors. Here are 4 common mistakes made when staging a home for sale.
Home Staging Mistake #1 – Breaking Your Budget
While home staging has the potential to sell your house faster, it also requires additional expenses – and these can add up fast and quickly overwhelm any budget.
Consider the following cost aspects of home staging:
- The fees for the home staging professional
- Furnishing rental costs
- The expense of repairs and remodeling
Who hasn’t experienced a minor home repair project that quickly escalates into an expensive undertaking?
Or who hasn’t bought a new decor item only to find it doesn’t work with existing furnishings? Sometimes, people spend way more than they intended to accommodate the new item.
Often, staging requires personal belongings to be removed. Where do you put these items? In this case, many sellers incur additional storage fees on top of the staging and furnishings rent payments.
And not every home sells right away. if your home ends up taking longer to sell, the cost of rental furniture can exceed your budget.
According to recent surveys, many homeowners paid on average:
- Between $650 and $2,300 to have their homes staged by a professional
- Extended furniture rentals costing $6,000 or more
- On average, traditional home staging costs anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000, and often, even more
Even if you do all the work yourself, home staging is also a time-consuming process, regardless of the cost.
Ultimately, all these efforts require money you hope to make back from a higher-priced sale, but it’s a bit of a risk.
Home Staging Mistake #2 – Poor Decor and Design Choices
The sofa you chose for staging looked perfect online. And the color seemed to match the rest of your decor when you saw it in the showroom. But when it arrives, you realize it clashes with everything else and doesn’t fit your design theme.
Situations like the above happen more often than people think.
And unfortunately, it’s not always possible to select another furnishing that can be delivered promptly.
Or maybe the person making the decor choices has, and there’s no way to say this nicely, bad design taste. So, instead of improving a listing, poor design choices made the sale even harder.
Perhaps the decor selections are fine, but they don’t appeal to large portions of buyers. With traditional home staging, you only get one chance.
Further, home staging decisions are often made under pressure and amid a thousand other choices and challenges. It’s extremely easy to make a mistake and select the wrong decor.
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Home Staging Mistake #3 – It Becomes a Never Ending Project
Ask any seasoned real estate sales professional; they’ll have at least one story about a never-ending home staging project.
These stories usually share some or all of the following elements:
- Contractors who don’t show up time after time
- Late furniture delivery
- Repair and renovation project delays
- Indecisive sellers who can’t make up their mind
The initial expectation was for the staging to take two weeks. But instead, it drags out over a month.
It’s easier than you think for a home staging project to drag on for weeks or even months. And obviously, such delays could completely derail a sale.
So, is there a way to avoid these common staging mistakes? The answer is yes – use virtual staging.
Virtual Staging to the Rescue!
Virtual staging is a state-of-the-art technology that lets photo editors and designers digitally furnish and adorn a room, thereby converting empty spaces into convincingly decorated and well-appointed interiors.
The process of virtual staging is remarkably easy. You begin with a photograph, which you then provide to a skilled virtual staging designer.
From there, you witness a remarkable transformation.
These experts insert furnishings from diverse design styles and catalogs of computer-generated items, including chairs, sofas, tables, mirrors, rugs, plants, and almost anything you can envision.
All of these additions are strategically placed within the photo to achieve the desired aesthetic and style for the space. The result is stunning listing photos.
Now that you understand virtual staging let’s discuss its benefits and how it helps prevent unfortunate, costly home staging mistakes.
1. Better Speed to Market
Traditional staging requires time and effort. And in today’s fast-paced sellers’ market, time is money.
Consider the following advantages of virtual staging:
- No contractor delays
- There are no worries about furniture deliveries running late
- You can remodel an entire kitchen in a day or two
With virtual staging solutions, turnaround times are shorter — just two or fewer business days — thus, you can market and sell the home sooner.
For more information, check out this article on using virtual staging to sell a listing fast.
2. Virtual Staging Is Cost-Effective
As we’ve seen, traditional home staging isn’t cheap. You will likely need to hire an interior designer, rent furniture and decor, and pay for repairs.
In contrast, virtual staging can quickly and cost-effectively stage an entire home for much less cost.
- On average, virtual staging will cost you $10-$30 per image
- The staging is done digitally and isn’t labor-intensive. The process is also much less disruptive to the seller
- And there’s a reason sellers and sales agents love virtual staging – the possibilities are endless!
Virtual staging can quickly and cost-effectively produce a stunning appearance for a home for sale without the risks of traditional staging.
3. More Options and Greater Flexibility
Virtual staging is highly flexible. Virtual staging providers have vast portfolios of furnishings and style options featuring popular decorating options.
You can showcase a home according to the latest design trend or several.
It also allows you to creatively sample paint colors, furniture, flooring, and cabinets or see how remodeling ideas would look before starting the work.
This flexibility means that decorating mistakes are less likely, and when they occur, they are much easier to fix.
All in all, virtual staging allows for changes quickly and with little to no expense.
4. Virtual Staging Looks Fantastic!
In a world where almost all home sales start online, you must do everything to get your listing noticed and people excited about it.
Virtual staging helps you to market a home online with stunning visuals that get attention.
Most virtual staging providers feature extensive design libraries featuring different interior styles, room types, and decor accessories.
This powerful technology can even be used to perform digital repairs, decluttering projects, and even upgrades to landscaping.
Consider the following uses of the technology:
- Sample different flooring options and materials
- Compare various kitchen cabinet colors and looks
- See what color tile works best in a bathroom
Want to see virtual staging samples? Here are some examples of virtual staging — what is virtual staging in real estate (examples included).
Now that you see how virtual staging can help prevent home staging mistakes, where can you get high-quality virtual staging at great prices? We’re happy that you asked.
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Virtual Staging Service
Residential. Commercial. Virtually transform any space.
Let AgentUp Help You Avoid Home Staging Mistakes
The bottom line? Traditional home staging can be a real benefit for quickly selling a home at a higher price. But it’s risky and could require more time and money than expected.
Virtual staging is faster and less expensive. Plus, it offers greater variety and flexibility.
And AgentUp makes virtual staging easy and affordable.
All you need to do is upload photos of your empty or outdated rooms, select your desired furnishings and decor, and we will return your beautifully staged images in less than 48 hours.
It’s as simple as that!
Also, there’s more to AgentUp than just virtual staging.
As industry leaders, we specialize in integrating cutting-edge technology into real estate digital marketing, delivering attention-grabbing content tailored for online consumption.
Another significant benefit is that AgentUp can also help you hire full-time or part-time virtual real estate assistants to help you implement a successful marketing strategy for your business.
Your path to improved digital marketing starts here.
Sign up for a free AgentUp account today and learn how we can help you use virtual staging and other real estate marketing solutions.
Thank you for reading this article on common home staging mistakes. If you found this article helpful, check out these other related resources:
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- How to Use a Real Estate Virtual Assistant to Grow Your Business
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- Real Estate Transaction Coordinator Checklist (Ultimate Guide)
