One word – competition. That should suffice but that would also suffice in making this the shortest blog ever, so let me explain. At a recent networking meeting I was talking with a real estate agent who said most of her listings were 2 – 300K and there’s not much of a call to stage those homes, the clients really don’t have the money to stage. To that I replied – oh contrare.
First of all a client who is selling a home in that price range probably has a smaller margin for error, in other words, they need to get every penny possible out of their property. We know from a 2007 Home Gain Survey of over 2000 realtors that sellers who invested in staging services recovered over 343% of that cost in the sale of their home. They are also probably in a situation that they can’t afford to have the property sit on the market a long time. According to a National Association of Realtors survey, homes that sold after four weeks on the market sold for 6% less than ones within the first four weeks!
Second thing to consider – there are a lot of homes bought and sold in that price range and if an agent wants it to be their listings that are the ones selling the agent needs to ask themselves “what am I doing to make my listings stand out from the crowd?” I did some research yesterday, 3/24/2017 and went to Realtor.com, searched for the Asheville NC zip code and pulled listings for recently sold, then I filtered by price range. This is an exercise you can do any time for any zip code. These were the results:
$0 – $250K 750 – 49%
$250 – $400K 455 – 30%
$400K – $600 205 – 13%
$600K – $900K 79 – 5%
$900K – $1.2M 27 – 2%
$1.2M – $3M 15 – 1%
Almost half of the homes recently sold were $250K or less. How many of those properties were your listings?
Third and final point that I want to make is – you may have several listings in your business, but chances are, a client selling a home in the 2 – 300K range has only this one property they are selling. To you, it’s not a big hit to reduce the price $5K, $10K or even $20K to get the property sold, but to the property owner even a $5K reduction is a really big deal. How much better would it be for you, the real estate professional to say, “Hey, let’s do this, your home has been on the market a while, before we are forced to reduce the list price to get it sold, why don’t we consult with a professional home stager, we’ll take some new photos and generate some new interest. “ A consultation for that type of property would cost less than 1/10 of 1% of the list price and a full staging could cost as little as 50% of the first price reduction*. Keep in mind that stagers often have a wide range of services that can fit into even the smallest budget. Staging just a couple rooms can make enough of an impact to attract buyers. The best case scenario is to have the home staged before it’s placed on the market but it’s never too late to make improvements.
Suggesting a staging consultation to your client adds to your credibility. It demonstrates extra effort on your part and it’s even been known to happen that a bidding war takes place and the property sells for above listing. How big of a hero would you be in that case?
Linda Harris
Linda’s Elegant Staging and Redesign
*For a complete list of services and fees, contact us @ 724-712-8824
