MFLN Members - Click to Watch the Video

This week Martha Webb, author of Dress Your House for Success and the Certified Home Marketing Specialist designation joined us on the Matthew Ferrara Learning Network. She offered our members a few ideas on how staging homes continues to offer competitive advantages to properties in today’s markets. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

Matthew: What’s the key concept behind staging homes?

Webb: Most marketing does the job of getting the buyer to the doorstep of the home. Price, location and basic features attract them online and might get them to drive by or make an appointment. Staging is what takes over once they “cross the threshold” and begin evaluating the home from the inside.

Matthew: Can you describe the core principles of staging?

Webb: Staging requires you to present the home the way buyers want to buy, not the way sellers want to sell. So it requires you to declutter the home, neutralize overly-personalized features and ensure things are in a state of good repair.

Matthew: If you watch television, you’d think staging means decorating a home and spending a lot of money.

Webb: In fact, proper staging is the exact opposite. Decluttering and neutralizing incur little or no costs in most cases; repairs may require some money, but it’s usually well spent.

Matthew: What factors are affecting how homes should be staged today?

Webb: Agents have to contend with two important issues in today’s marketplace. First, the “generation gap” between most sellers – who are Baby Boomers – and most buyers – who are basically their children. The way Baby Boomers have lived in and present their homes often does not connect with the younger buyers. What’s important to sellers who are living in the home is usually not at all important – or interesting – to Gen X or Gen Y buyers. So homes need to be repositioned to demonstrate their values to the buyers. Second, today’s sellers and buyers are simply much more frugal than in the past. So sellers don’t have the cash to put into elaborate or complex repositioning of their homes, and buyers are being overly analytical of a home’s position in the market. Proper staging addresses both the generation gap and the more cost-conscious consumer.

Matthew: Where is staging going? Is it just a “fun for television” concept or something from the boom that no longer matters?

Webb: Staging is more important than ever. It’s often the lowest cost way to increase a home’s competitiveness in the market, and it gets the sellers focused on the buyer, not themselves, in the selling process. Once you exhaust your ability to keep lowering the price, staging becomes even more important as a tool to make the property stand out in the minds of buyers.

Matthew: Where can our viewers (and readers) learn more about proper staging.

Webb: They can visit www.marthawebb.com where we have a variety of resources including our consumer-materials, DVDs and our upcoming schedule of certification courses.