Sellers are often at a crossroads when the time comes for them to sell their home in the market - should you stage your home or not? Varying opinions can be read online about the benefits of home staging, but at the end of the day, will staging your home lead to a higher selling price?
Some sellers prefer to stage their homes prior to listing it on the real estate market in hopes that they would get multiple offers and higher than asking price. As previously reported here on Realty Today, home staging helps the buyers envision themselves living at your home.
In turn, the majority of sellers who stage their homes have reported to receiving multiple offers on the day they have listed their houses on the market. In terms of selling price, however, does home staging help boost the price or is it simply a waste of money?
Realtor.com notes that there is no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to home staging. It can be beneficial to some, but it can also prove useless to others. The publication also reports on a study conducted in 2012 and published by the Journal of Housing Research in 2015 on the difference in valuations based on staging conditions.
The study was conducted on more than 800 prospective buyers who were asked to offer prices on different home choices. One choice was a vacant home without any furniture; another was a home with "ugly" furniture while another was a house with neutral walls.
The study revealed that the buyers' offers on the said homes were the same at $200,000 despite the differences in their appearances. The benefit of staging, however, lies in the fact that listings of homes that are staged often sit at a shorter time on the market than homes that were un-staged.
A 2013 study revealed that homes that were staged were sold in an average of 22 days while those that were not were sold in 125 days. Sellers, however, should also take note that the costs of home staging can run for a couple of hundreds to thousands.
