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Home Staging Key For Quick Home Sales
A home stager looks at each room and identifies the finest way to showcase your homes best features for prospective buyers. Where a realtor might suggest certain rooms be painted, a home stager goes further and recommends the new paint colors, changes to the window treatments to make the room lighter and brighter, and so much more. Home staging is helping homeowners plan a home for sale.
It says in a survey that home staging can reduce the time a house spends on the market by one third to one half, along with the potential to increase the sale price of the house by 10-15%.
Each home stager offers a different mix of services, so you want to find someone who matches your needs and budget. Budget conscious homeowners can get a consultation which often includes a written report. You’ll get a list of do-it-yourself staging projects, from removing personal effects and clutter, to re-painting rooms with popular, neutral colors that everyone likes.
Ideally the items on the list will be prioritized from critical to nice-to-have, so if you can’t get everything done in time, you’ll get the maximum benefit.
Home Staging Services
If you don’t need to sell your home right away and want to do more work yourself, the consultation will get you started but be honest with yourself as to how much time you can truly commit to this project. If time is critical and there’s a large inventory of homes competing with your house, you’ll want to give serious consideration to using more of these staging services.
The magic in working with a home stager is they have no emotional attachment to your home. Costs range from a consultation for a few hundred dollars up to 1% of your sale price, but home stagers don’t price their work on a percentage of the listing price. There’s a huge difference in services offered from a one-time visit and consultation to the home stager who handles all preparation for putting your home on the market (from storing excess furniture to decorating your home with rental furnishings). An empty home might also require more work and rental furniture than a furnished home.
* Staging consultation identifies what needs to disappear – clutter, personal items and excess furniture … and what needs to be changed like furniture placement, paint colors and accessories.
* There are stagers who rent furniture that is appropriate for a home on the market, which is especially important for unfurnished/unoccupied homes.
* Stagers will shop for homeowners, for the accessories like throw pillows, plants and wall hangings that show off the best features of a room.
* When requested, stagers will manage the transformation of your home from replacing furniture, to painting a home and hanging new window treatments.
* Many home stagers also offer photographs of your staged home using a wide angle camera, which is very useful for your online listing and print marketing.
Home Staging Marketing Strategies to Sell Properties
Is Your Marketing Hot?
The number one question that I always get from all of my clients, whether they are Certified Home Stagers, Home Stagers in Training, Real Estate Agents or Investors, Small Business Owners, Speakers, Entrepreneurs – you name it, this is their question: How do I market my business?
Many have some idea how to market their business, but they don’t know how to effectively market, in order to get the results they desire, which is the key. Usually, they delegate their marketing to an advertising channel such as the yellow pages, some random online marketing or a flyer or two that has been passed out at a meeting in the hopes that everyone that takes one will call you back keep hoping!
I love the coffee cup above as an extra hot marketing tool. Not only is the Bakery advertising with each cup of coffee, but they are in turn selling advertising to other clients on the mug. Super Smart! And of course the mug makes sense to their customer since they serve all sorts of coffee drinks at the Bakery.
Could they have done better with an extraordinary offer and a guarantee? Of course! The problem was lack of space, so they worked with what they had.
The real question though, is what does it take to make your marketing hot?
1) It must speak to your customer- Just like the coffee speaks to the customers buying a croissant, yours must do the same. Ask yourself who your customer is and what appeals directly to them. Is it a real estate agent, an investor, a home seller who is your customer and what speaks to them? Then, make sure your message sizzles!
2) Scare them or speak to their greed- Yes, that is the truth. The best way to capture your customer’s attention is by scaring the pants off of them or appealing to the sense of greed. So, if you are marketing your Home Staging Services, then you would send them a message like; Are you ready to sit on that listing for another 6 months? Or, Would you like to make an extra $5,000 this month?
3) Make in Incredible Offer- You can do this in a variety of ways. It can be accomplished with a 100% money back guarantee, the offer of a FREE flatscreen TV, 50% off, Buy One Get One Free, or even thru a great prize that your customer wins by participating in your contest. The idea is to give them something so juicy that they feel compelled to give you a shot.
4) Market Consistently- One of the most attractive things to potential clients is that they see your marketing consistently. Now they know you are not a, fly by night, home stager, running your business as a hobby instead of as a real company, and that you are smart enough to know how to market. That in and of itself is often appealing enough to some future clients.
5) Surprise them with your Marketing- The coffee cup was a surprise, so it was fun. When we stage homes and hide a pocket of emotion in the drawer and the buyer opens the drawer, that is fun (and it is house marketing). Having a message like the 25 reasons a rubber duck can sell your home is a fun surprise because they don,t expect it. If you really want to have ..hot..marketing, surprise them with the unexpected.
I think the last thing I would say about marketing is to simply look and see what your competition is doing and do the opposite. They are the ones inclined to post an ad and then not get any calls so they quickly determine the ad does not work. Hmmm, maybe they did not place an ad in a location that their customers see, or the ad just was not compelling.
The best example I can give for this is when I started my own Home Staging company, I looked around at all the other Home Stager Certification Program out there talking about making houses pretty and it dawned on me that there marketing was all about them instead of the results they could achieve for their potential clients. That is when I came out with our tag line of “Anybody can make your house pretty, we make it SELL.” Obviously, that did the trick.
So, let’s get you a great list of customers beating down your door so you can show them how extraordinary you really are, while introducing them to your hot marketing.
Sincerely,
Karen Schaefer – Home Staging Training and Certification APSD
Karen Schaefer