“How Does Home Staging Work?”
Most home owners haven’t embarked on home staging journeys before. It’s often their realtor who recommends home staging. So the question we get most often (before how much does home staging cost) is how does home staging work? Well, we’re here to tell you.
Let’s break down the home staging process. We’ve simplified it here, but you’ll get the overall idea.
The List
Home staging always starts with a conversation - often with a realtor to help us understand the seller's needs and the optimal buyer.
The next conversation is with the home owner. As home stagers, we need to know if the home will be vacant or furnished. Does any work need to be done to the home before staging?
We tour the home and take copious photographs and notes.
We create a comprehensive home staging plan which informs the proposal we send to the home owner. With the home owner’s go ahead, we send our Staging Agreement and with that and a deposit, we are on our way to staging.
We then dive into our home staging warehouse to pull sofas, cocktail tables, dining tables, bed frames, mattresses, carpets, accessories, etc. Sometimes we have to go on shopping excursions to fill in where needed (we don’t mind).
We now have space in our Ashley Falls facility to pre-stage - set up a room to see what else we need or if another color scheme, living room chair or pillow might work better. This has been a great benefit to our design process.
Once everything is finalized, we load up our truck and head out to stage the home. Small homes can take a day; large homes can take multiple days. Staging doesn’t happen in a matter of hours as it seems to on our favorite HGTV and Magnolia Network shows. We will often make multiple trips back to the warehouse if we need to swap items out, add more furniture or find just the right last accessory to complete a room.
Sometimes homes are staged for months, sometimes days! Then it's time to pack, wrap and bring it all back.
Measurements are our friends. Measuring saves us from lugging a too-large sofa to a home - only to then have to take it back to the warehouse.
Ahhhh. This is our favorite step: a beautifully staged home…right before it goes under contract and we need to move it all out.
Our process works. We see it happen over and over and over again.
Staged homes sell faster and garner up to 6% more than unstaged homes. It’s so worth the home owner’s or developers investment. And it’s so worth our time and expertise.
Look through our Metro and Country galleries to see dozens of single-family homes, city apartments and condos where we’ve worked our process and our magic.