Staging to the Rescue, Yet Again (Our July Deal of the Month).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. This is best real estate quote ever:

"You should always be the first love, the second wife, and the third real estate agent."

Putting gender to the side, the point is that it sometimes takes getting punched in the face by reality to take effective steps to sell your home and hire the right agent. You don't always get it right the first time, either. We didn't have to be the third agent; being second worked out well enough. Our recent closing proves, however, that not every agent gives the same advice. Here's the story.

Just Throwing The Property Onto the Market

We got a call a few months ago from a desperate seller. Her apartment, which had been asking $2,400,000, had languished on the market for nearly nine months without a buyer, without an offer. She realized that her agent wasn't that active, wasn't giving her any feedback, and she needed to get this property sold so she could move on with her life, which was across the globe. 

She didn't know the half of it.

• The apartment needed staging
• The apartment needed a slight rethink on price
• The apartment needed inspirational copy

Sellers don't always realize the value of staging. Frankly, some sellers have most, if not all of their equity tied up in their property, even in New York City. Staging can be expensive. So what can you do?

Action Steps to Success

This was a lovely, high-floor unit just off Central Park West in a special building. Not only did the apartment get great light and have a large living space with a gorgeous fireplace. There is a gym on the roof level!  You can rent a small office from the building on the top floor, too, with views! What wasn't to love? Well, any buyer who went online saw a writeup that might scare them away. It wasn't that buyers weren't up for doing work, but didn't want to think they had to do everything. This wasn't exactly a fixer-upper. But it was something you might want to make your own. Think of it as guiding your potential homebuyers from a place of inspiration!

The first thing we did was remove the scary photos. Then we removed the scary write up. 

And then we added in the lovely virtual staging photos. And encouraged our seller to actually stage the unit, within her limited budget. 

Staging on a Budget

One surprise along the way: this seller of a $2mm+ home didn't have the $15-20,000 to stage her home; the 9 months of marketing had sapped her budget. So we went carefully through everything in her apartment to take stock of what would work with a staging overhaul, and what needed to go. The French Country Chic needed to go. The cool Louis Vuitton steamer trunk and all the vintage silver could stay. The idea: more Ralph Lauren vibes, less 2000s leopard print. $1000-2000 later, the apartment was done. Yes, this took some sweat equity on her part. But she had the time and not the money. And the most important thing was that the staging needed to match what buyers would see online with the virtual staging. They couldn't be let down when they came in. They needed to be inspired by both the copy and the property. 

Virtual Staging

The virtual staging took a bit longer than the real staging, shockingly. Since our seller came from the fashion industry, she understood the importance and power of images. 99% of buyers will see that first image and either click or move on. Two weeks later, we had a series of images we loved, showing how one could create a really dynamite home with just a few changes.  

Pricing

Ah yes, pricing. We didn't think the price was off by much, but the market guided us to be a bit more conservative. The $2.4mm asking price was lowered to $2.295mm, which we felt would put us right in the range where we would sell the home. This was a tough pill to swallow for our seller, but she understood that few buyers would take action in this environment if they didn't feel there was value. 

The Result

We were all ready to launch, when a friend of a friend of the seller bought the property before we could even go to market. My admission: I really wanted to test the market to see if we could get the apartment bid back to her old asking price. It looked fabulous. The seller had worked so hard to properly prepare her unit for sale the second time. But we went to contract at our new $2,295,000 asking price, and the seller was thrilled. She sold her collection of plates (which you see in the "before" photo above), and her staging was so incredible that the buyer took the apartment fully furnished. 

That is a result that proves the power of staging, and proper marketing. 

To get a result like this, be in touch with us! We know what it takes to attract what matters most for our sellers. - Scott & Magnetic