If you are trying to sell or lease out your home but looking for innovative ways to market the property, you may have heard of the term “home staging.” Home staging is a real estate marketing strategy that uses the principles of interior decoration to make a home more attractive to potential buyers or renters.
Home stagers create an emotional connection between the potential buyer and the home by decorating and arranging the home to match buyers’ ideas of their dream home. Home staging aims to make buyers fall in love with the home. Foothills Properties in Green Valley notes that buyers are more likely to buy a home if they feel a sense of attachment to it.
Some of the techniques employed in home staging are:
- De-cluttering creates an illusion of space and also makes the home airier, brighter, and easier to navigate.
- Depersonalize the home by removing personal items. It helps buyers view the home as “their own” space.
- Fix defects in the interior and exterior surfaces of the home that might impair its appeal.
- Using lighting, furniture, and décor to grab attention in photos and real life.
- Highlight the outstanding features of the home; use the positives to draw attention away from the negatives.
The question homeowners often ask is, “Since my home is already furnished and decorated, do I need home staging?” Or “What can home staging do for me that interior decorating is not already doing?” These questions arise because homeowners don’t understand the difference between home staging and interior decoration.
But this post will explain the key differences between home staging and interior decoration.
Home staging versus interior decoration
Home staging is often hard to tell from interior decoration because they use the same tools; lighting, placement, colors, and other concepts employed in interior design. However, despite these obvious similarities, there are clear differences.
1. Purpose: design versus marketing
Home staging is not about design. Even though home staging uses the tools of design, it does so for different reasons than interior decoration. A professional home stager is a real estate marketing expert who simply uses interior decoration principles. The work of an interior decorator is done when a home is appealing, but the job of a home stager is done when the home is sold.
2. Focus: homeowners versus buyer
When designing a home, interior decorators focus on the style and preferences of the owner. Home stagers don’t do this. Focusing on the homeowner’s preferences when staging a home defeats the purpose of staging the home. That is because the design limits the home’s appeal to only those buyers who share the homeowner’s preferences. Home staging seeks to design the house in a way that gives it widespread appeal. It increases the probability of the home being sold quickly.
3. Priority: comfort versus visual presentation
The primary concerns in the mind of an interior decorator are comfort and function. That is completely different from what home stagers prioritize. Everything a home stager does is to create enough allure to make a good first impression when buyers set their eyes on the home. It often means optimizing the home’s appearance for display on digital media. Potential buyers who encounter photos and videos of the house online should want to stop scrolling and click on those images.
4. Details: minimal versus maximum
Interior decoration stamps the homeowner’s identity on the home, but home staging seeks to erase the owner’s presence from it. Unlike interior decoration, home staging does not include extraneous details in the design. It provides the basic décor elements to make the space feel like home. But it leaves out enough details to give potential buyers the chance to add their ideas to the design. That helps the buyer feel like the house could be their future home.
To summarize, interior decoration turns your space into a home, but home staging simply puts on a show for buyers. Home stagers know that buying decisions are mostly from emotion; people are more likely to buy something if they like it at first sight. Home stagers also stay up-to-date with the home design trends buyers in an area are looking for.
By combining their knowledge of buyer psychology, interior decoration trends, and interior design tools, they can take an ordinary-looking home and transform it into a home worthy of the front cover of a home design magazine. The effect is that buyers are drawn to the house and willing to pay more for it. That is why staged homes sell faster and for more money.
Data from estate agents across the country shows that more than 80% of homes that were staged sold faster than similar homes that were not staged. But these results depend on how well a home is staged. Talking to a professional home stager before you put your home on the market can help you sell the house fast and let you make more money on the sale.
