How to make the most money after staging your previously listed home

May 9, 2017 by melissamarro Leave a Comment

So, you’ve finally decided to stage your home? The bad news is that you’ve already missed the buyer pool who would have paid you the most money. The good news is that you are in better shape to get top dollar than you were before you staged. In order for home staging to be effective, there are some things that you need to do NOW, however.

The best buyers for your home are always those who are anxiously awaiting new listings to hit the market. They’ve already been looking and haven’t found what they want yet. They are willing to pay much more than buyers who are just entering the market. Frustration and disappointment increase their emotional desire when viewing a properly staged home that works for their family’s needs. These buyers only exist in the first couple of weeks of your home hitting the market. After that point, you begin contributing to their frustration, not solve it.

Let’s face it, if your house has been on the market already, they’ve seen it. Sure, you may not have known about them, but that’s because they didn’t care about your home enough to make a showing appointment. If they did, and your house didn’t meet the cut, then you are definitely working against the curve.

When listing your house for sale, time is money…

How to make the most money after staging your previously listed home:

Update the listing with high quality photographs showcasing the staging. This can’t be over stated. Potential buyers are first shopping online and they really only care about the photos. If the real estate photos aren’t enticing, they won’t get excited. Quality photos of a great staging job, can create high levels of increased perceived value. This may create a bidding war, if you haven’t waited too long on the market.

Change the price. This is one tactic that seems tricky, but understand that in most Multiple Listing Services (MLS), buyers only see what’s on the “hot sheet”. Hot sheet homes are ones that are either new on market (and you already missed that golden opportunity), have a change in status (like falling out of contract), or have a price change. Notice that I said a price change, not necessarily a price reduction. After getting the photographs back, have your Realtor reassess the pricing of the home with the current competition. Even if you only adjust the home by a small variance, say $100 in either direction, it is usually enough to land on the “hot sheet” and get buyers taking another look at your new digs.

Host a broker open house. A broker open house is different than a standard open house as the goal is to get Realtors, not buyers through the front door. Your Realtor will need to do this part. They should also have some kind of food and giveaway to entice other agents to show up. Since your home has likely been seen by many of the local real estate professionals, they will need to see that what they have to sell has changed. By seeing the home in a new light, they may realize they have customers who were waiting just for a house like yours (who may even have seen the previous before photos in MLS).

Invite the agents who previously showed the house back to see it. Yes. You are having a broker open, so this may seem redundant, but the agents who previously showed the house DID have a buyer who wanted a house like yours, but didn’t select yours. This is a great time to invite them back out to the house and get their feedback on changes. Find out if their customer has moved on, or if they are still looking. If they’ve moved on, get a commitment from them that they’ll show it again, if they have a buyer that is a match for them. They will. If you hadn’t showed them the change, they might not have, however. They instead would remember what their customers said about the house when they showed it before.

How to make the most money selling your home:

Now that we’ve gone through how to make the most money after staging your previously listed home, let me give a quick piece of advice. If you really want to make the most money possible selling your home, STAGE IT BEFORE YOU LIST IT. As I said, at the beginning of this article, the best buyers – the ones who will pay the most money for a home – are there BEFORE you list it. Don’t try to save a couple of thousand dollars by waiting to see “if it doesn’t sell”. Even if it does sell, it can be guaranteed, that if you sold it without staging that you left money on the table. Period.

Buying a home is an emotional choice. People don’t buy four walls, floors, and windows. They buy a life. If your home gave them anything less, you were paid too little for it. End of story.

You may also enjoy reading: The Curse of the Vanilla Box. Selling an Empty House.

The curse of the vanilla box. Selling an empty house.

May 3, 2017 by melissamarro Leave a Comment

This is as real as any horror flick out there. Imagine shopping for a new home. As all the Zillow.com ads say, “you’re not just looking for a house. You’re looking for a place for your life to happen.” But what you find are either lived-in messes, where you will need gallons of paint, primer, and possibly a vat of Krud Kutter, commerical grade cleaning products, or on the opposite spectrum bland vanilla boxes.

Let’s take this fine specimen of a house. It is lovely in every fashion. Unfortunately, it is about as boring a vanilla box as it comes. Carpet: check! Freshly painted walls: check! Windows: check!

Are you excited about moving onto the next photo, holding in anticipation of what it will bring? Does this home make you feel like this Zillow commerical does?

Do you feel the next phase in your life starting here? Do you think that image on Dad’s phone where he says, “If you have a bad dream, you can come to our room. Your mamma snores.” would have been so powerful an image if it had been a picture of an empty vanilla box? Would it have created the same imagination of the “dream life” Dad was trying to portray to his little son?

Let’s check out what this SAME EXACT HOME looks like staged and see if it fits a little better into the Zillow commerical “dream life”.

Yes. These are the same rooms, from the same direction, taken with the same camera & lens, by the same photographer. Do they FEEL different to you? Yes. Of course they do. People buy homes on emotion. Once they get through all of the rough data, which home to pick is all a matter of connecting to it emotionally. I’ll let Elizabeth Banks showcase this point for me in her Realtor.com ad.

Just like those mini quiches, staging skews buyer’s perspectives. Unlike the quiches though, this isn’t a bad thing. Home staging showcases the possibilities of the life that could be lived in the home. Think of it more like It’s a Wonderful Life looped up with a little A Christmas Carol. Sometimes seeing how things could be can really make you appreciate what’s here and now!

Does home staging in Jacksonville really work?

March 30, 2017 by melissamarro Leave a Comment

The question regularly comes about, whether directly asked, or in a round about way, of whether home staging, here in Jacksonville, actually works. Can you PROVE that home staging saves time on market or gets the seller better offers?

As the owner of Rave Home Staging, one of my favorite things is to watch how quickly our homes go under contract. The argument could be whether that is because they are simply priced better than the competition, or whether the staging helped. This is when a good old nitty-gritty look at market comps helps prove the point.

A look at a $650,000 home in Queens Harbor Country Club

The owner of this home is one of our regular investor clients. This was his personal home. When deciding to live in the home or sell it vacant, he decided his family was better off moving out. Because he is very familiar with the value that home staging provides for his Jacksonville flip homes, he called us out to make a difference in this very personal sale.

One of the reasons that this real estate investor decided to stage his personal home, despite the fact that this would be a pretty heavy price tag, the cost of vacant home staging is 1% of list price, is because he knows that in the end, he will receive a return on investment greater than the cost of staging.

Now that his home has gone “under contract”, looking at the numbers, he’s absolutely right! Take a look at the photo below. In it you will see that 13440 Troon Trace Lane, Jacksonville, FL 32225 was only on the market 43 days as compared to similar homes, with lower costs per sqft, that took approximately 100 days on market.

The average price per square foot in this neighborhood example is $178.21. The subject house is 3,255 sqft. The average list to sale price ratio is 97%.If our investor’s house closes using the average ratio, they will sell for $630,000 ($193.54/sqft). This means that they will sell at $15.33 more per sqft, = $49,899.15.

The “high” cost of staging this $650,000 was $6500, and should, statistically create a return on investment of more than $50,000 to this seller. That is a 764% ROI!

So, let me ask you, would you write a check for $6500 to receive a check for approximately $50,000 at closing, approximately 90 days later? This is why professional real estate investors and home builders use our service. Isn’t it time “average homeowners” did?

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