ASK JUSTIN: GUARANTEED VS CONVENTIONAL

QUESTION: What are the key differences between Guaranteed Home Staging and Conventional Home Staging?

ANSWER: The key differences between Guaranteed Home Staging® and Conventional Home Staging lie in the financial aspects and the level of service provided. Here's an overview of each:

1. Financial Arrangement:

   - Guaranteed Home Staging®: In this model, the home staging company typically covers the upfront costs of staging the property. The homeowner or real estate agent agrees to pay for the staging services only if the property sells within a specified time frame. If the property doesn't sell within that timeframe, the staging company may waive the fees or offer a discounted rate.

   - Conventional Home Staging: In conventional home staging, the homeowner or real estate agent pays for the staging services upfront, regardless of whether the property sells or not. The fees are typically based on the services provided, the size of the property, and the duration of the staging.

2. Level of Service:

   - Guaranteed Home Staging®: Since the staging company is invested in the sale of the property, they may provide a more comprehensive level of service. This can include not only staging the home but also assisting with market analysis, pricing strategies, and other aspects of the selling process. The staging company may have a vested interest in ensuring a successful sale and may offer additional support to increase the chances of selling within the agreed timeframe.

   - Conventional Home Staging: With conventional home staging, the primary focus is on staging the property to make it more visually appealing and marketable. The staging company typically provides furniture, accessories, and expertise to showcase the property in its best light. However, their involvement may not extend beyond the staging process itself.

The choice between Guaranteed Home Staging®and Conventional Home Staging depends on various factors, including the homeowner's financial situation, their level of confidence in selling the property within a specific timeframe, and the desired level of service and support throughout the selling process. It's essential to consider the terms, conditions, and costs associated with each option to make an informed decision. 

ASK JUSTIN: OCCUPIED VS VACANT

QUESTION: What is the difference between occupied home staging and vacant home staging? Which one is better?

Vacant home staging is often considered better than occupied home staging for several reasons:

1. Neutralizing Personal Style: Vacant home staging allows for a blank canvas where a professional stager can create a neutral and universally appealing design. It helps remove the personal style and belongings of the current occupants, allowing potential buyers to envision their own furniture and décor in the space.

2. Highlighting Space and Flow: Vacant homes often appear more spacious and have better flow because there are no personal belongings cluttering the rooms. Staging can strategically arrange furniture and accessories to showcase the layout, room size, and architectural features, making it easier for buyers to understand the potential of the space.

3. Avoiding Distractions: Occupied homes can have personalized décor, clutter, or specific furniture arrangements that may not resonate with all potential buyers. Vacant home staging avoids these distractions and presents a clean, well-organized environment, ensuring the focus remains on the property's features, rather than the personal belongings of the occupants.

4. Flexibility for Photography and Showings: Vacant homes are easier to photograph and showcase during showings since there are no personal items or daily living activities to navigate around. This allows for high-quality marketing materials and provides a smoother experience for potential buyers when visiting the property.

5. Emotional Connection: While occupied home staging can still create a warm and inviting atmosphere, vacant home staging allows buyers to visualize themselves in the space more easily. The neutral and stylized presentation can evoke positive emotions, facilitating a stronger emotional connection with the property.

Overall, vacant home staging provides more flexibility for design, photography, and showings while allowing potential buyers to focus on the property's features and visualize their own lifestyle in the space. 

ASK JUSTIN: FULL VS. PARTIAL HOME STAGING

Question: What is the difference between full home staging and partial home staging? Why is full home staging considered more effective?


Answer: Full home staging is generally considered better than partial home staging for real estate because it creates a more cohesive and appealing presentation of the property. Here are a few reasons why full home staging is often preferred:

1. Improved Visual Appeal: Full home staging ensures that all rooms and spaces in the house are professionally furnished and decorated. This cohesive look creates a sense of flow and harmony throughout the property, enhancing its visual appeal and making it more attractive to potential buyers.

2. Better Buyer Connection: When a home is fully staged, potential buyers can better envision themselves living in the space. Each room is optimized to showcase its purpose and potential, allowing buyers to emotionally connect with the property and imagine themselves making it their own.

3. Highlighting Key Features: Full home staging allows you to highlight the key features and selling points of the property effectively. By staging each room, you can draw attention to architectural details, maximize space utilization, and emphasize desirable amenities, all of which can significantly impact a buyer's perception of the property.

4. Consistency and Professionalism: A fully staged home exudes a sense of professionalism and attention to detail. It gives the impression that the property has been well-maintained and cared for, increasing buyer confidence and potentially driving up the perceived value of the home.

While partial home staging can still provide some benefits, opting for a comprehensive staging approach tends to yield better overall results when it comes to presenting a property in its best light and enticing potential buyers. 

PILLOW FIGHT!

A few weeks ago a local throw pillow creator “PILLOW FIGHT!” reached out to me and said, “Hey check out our pillows, you like them, could you use them for home staging in Portland or Seattle?” I replied, “Heck yeah! How about if we create a challenge for our home stagers and have them stage a room based off your pillows?” They sent over four sets of pillows and we created four rooms based on what we had received. The fabrics are beautiful, they have just the right amount of duck down and feather filling. Check out what we created together:

 

The deep blue and gold of this hounds tooth pillow inspired our designer to create a lusciously rich primary bedroom. She knew the gold lamps would work perfectly with the houndstooth pattern, navy coverlet and pillows as well as the velvet gold throw pillows used behind the pillows.

 

At first look, an untrained eye might only see the elegant plum coral fronds covering this pillow. We might fail to see the matte charcoal gray background. This color combination inspired us to create a lovely twin bedroom with the color combination of plum and grey. The result is a restful sophisticated twin room any mom would die for!

 

We found this blue, intentionally distressed ikat pillow to be super inspirational. We used the navy, light blue, and light grey together to stage a queen bedroom. The secret was using at least one item of each of the four colors to pull the entire room together.

 

We love this interpretation of the chevron pattern with an onion dome influence. The emerald center strip is definitely the super star of this pillow. We wanted to keep it this way. We used the navy blue and white to fill the space and make the emerald strip large and in charge.

HOW TO REFRESH A STALE LISTING

“Days on Market” can be an anxiety-inducing stat for any listing. We’re asked to jump into a relisting process all the time when the first attempt wasn’t successful. These lonely properties left on the market for too long are called “Stale Donuts.” They no longer have that sticky-sweet, fresh and desired appeal and instead reek of “sad leftovers.” Not the emotion you are going for when trying to sell a home quickly and for the most money! 

We’ve collected the best tips from pros in the industry to remove and relist a property so that it looks like an entirely new home and new listing! Here is our 10 Step Plan to Relisting a Stale Donut. 

Step #1: Kill the Listing

Sellers are often afraid to remove the listing because they think their ideal buyer is “coming any minute.” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If your home has been listed for months on end, the current strategy hasn’t worked.  It’s time to change it up. In order to do that, you’re going to have to start from scratch and completely re-evaluate the situation. 

Step #2: Move Out

Generally, if your home has been sitting for a long time the reason is one of two major offenders: priced too high or presented poorly.  It may also be a combination of: vacant, empty and not showing well bare; priced too high; occupied and just looks like hell; or terrible staging.  Start with the vacating property and getting out of there. Pack up your stuff, relocate, go to an Airbnb, find a rental apartment, move into the vacation house that you have at the beach, go to the ADU that's in the backyard, get out of that house. Unfortunately, you are stopping the sale. Clearing out of the space gives you the opportunity to really prep the house for the next buyer.  

Step #3: Consult a Home Stager 

Home stagers know how to sell homes and they are coming to judge yours.  This is actually their greatest value. A home stager is going to be the first one to say, "Look, you have to repaint the bathroom, you have to get rid of that brown sponge-paint." You'll be like, "Why?" And the stager will say, "Well, it’s a huge turn off to the next buyer and makes this space look darker." The blunt honesty of telling you what will and will not appeal to the future buyer is no reflection of the home you LOVED, only the home you are trying to sell to another family. 

You should not pay a home stager for a consultation. It’s their job to tell you how to get that house ready for market. They're going to give you a lot of fantastic advice but you will not need to confirm a “yes or no” during that meeting.  All you're going to do is take notes of that advice.

Once the home stager is gone, then you're going to take that list and assign three values to each item: time, money, and energy. Once you have those three values assigned you can make a decision if you're going to do each one of those things or not. Take a breather after the stager leaves, assign reasonable numbers to each task and make a logical decision not an emotional one. 

Step #4: Execute the Scope of Work

Now you have that precious to-do list. That might mean you hire contractors, or DIY it, do some landscaping, painting, etc. Depending on the condition of the house, there may be a lot of moving parts. Coordinate with your people, create a timeline for these tasks and get organized. Figure out which you can do yourself and which you need to hire out. 

Step #5: Stage It

Finally, all the basics of the home are set and well-prepared for the next family. Now it’s time to SHOW OFF the features and functionality of the home so your ideal buyer will know from first glance what their life will look and feel like. This is when you're going to hire a home stager (hopefully Spade and Archer). They have the expertise in selling homes, skill in design and all the furniture ready to create a drop-dead gorgeous listing.  Your professional home stager will cost you around one to two percent of your final sales price, but they're going to bring you upwards of 10% more money at closing time. 

Your home stager is going to create a design using furniture, color and art in your house that is not reflective of your personal style choices. In fact, of all the people in the world who might buy your house, you are not one of them. Your home stager is going to design for the 90th percentile of people that are looking at your house so they can garner the most offers in the least amount of time. This is not about your taste, this is about visual merchandising for a product that you have to sell, and that's it. 

Bad staging can do more harm than good. Seriously reconsider hiring that budget stager. They might be more of a hindrance than a help. When it comes to comparing a cheap stager to a true professional, it's like having K-Mart compete against Nordstrom. Which one will you trust the largest investment of your lifetime to?

Step #6 Re-Document the Home

Your house is now perfect and ready for visitors – so let’s show it off with a show-stopping listing. This will include fresh photos, videos, 3D walkthrough, floor plans and a written description.  

Use these new items  to create a single property website. If you have a stale donut, having a single property website is going to allow you to control the narrative around this project.  While it will cost a little bit more, it is worth it. A professional real estate photographer will work wonders for that fresh listing.  

Step #7 Create a New Listing

Create a new MLS number so you can re-assign that to this fresh listing and no longer associate it with the old listing. You may be welcoming back home shoppers that had previously seen the home. Ideally, we want them thinking this is a whole new property.  

Step #8 Change the Price

Again, it’s usually one of two reasons why houses don't sell. The home is either overpriced or it’s not prepared correctly. If you are not prepared to drop your price a single dime, then raise the price by $10,000 dollars, or by $5,000 dollars, or by something, by anything. The way that people search for properties today is that they go to a listing website and they put in their price range. $400,000 to $500,000. And if your number comes up in that same exact range, you're only hitting those people that are looking for $400,000 to $500,000. Give them a slightly different searching number so they’ll get a slightly different demographic of people looking for this space.

Step #9 Create that Momentum

It’s a celebration! Pre-pandemic this would be the best time for a little house party! These days agents are creating excitement with technology and social media.  Any way that you can get people to view the home online will work! You have a stale donut on your hands and it's toxic. The second you can change the narrative around that project, the faster you will sell that house.

Step #10: Sell the House

Which brings us to step number ten: sell the freaking house. After online hub-bub, organize your leads, have private showings and watch those bids come in. Good luck!

Need a professional home stager to assess your stale donut? Here are the 4 easy steps to working with Spade and Archer to create a fresh listing: 

  1. Get your Instant Pricing.

  2. Schedule a Site Visit with us and we'll assess the property

  3. Schedule your Installation, we will send you a contract and invoice in short order

  4. Sell the house and schedule your Destage

It may seem like a lot to re-list, but with our "Exceptional Home Staging, Made Easy" process at Spade and Archer, it couldn't be more seamless. Have questions or find yourself wondering if you have a Stale Donut? Start with a quote with our Instant Pricing and one of our design managers will come out and visit your property. Let's sell it together!