RISMEDIA, May 13, 2009-Staging your home before listing it on the market is a crucial step that many homeowners often overlook. While the competition continues to be fierce in today’s market, homeowners must take the necessary steps in order to make their home stand out from the others. The International Association of Home Staging Professionals (IAHSPR) offers 5 home staging tips to help you compete in today’s market:
1. Home staging is not just for houses for sale. Home staging continues to cross over into many service areas that have nothing to do with selling a house. Traditional home staging involves working with sellers to prepare houses for sale, but today’s successful Accredited Staging Professionals have a multi-faceted business that allows them to serve clients with staging to live, help organize offices with staging to work, and provide event staging for a myriad of events from parties to large corporate parties. Home stagers also provide staging to live services for those remaining in their homes to help them refresh their interiors with simple solutions. Since much of what a home stager provides is the vision and organizational skills and ability to carry out that vision to fruition, their talents are being demanded by many parallel industries.
2. Home staging helps foreclosure, REO and short sale properties sell. With the increase of foreclosure, REO, and short sale properties in many markets throughout the United States, the need for presentation of these properties as a product that can sell is imperative. As professional home stagers continue to develop relationships with banks and investors, the services they offer of being able to visually package and market a property will continue to gain value. Banks and Investors need to invest money up front to stage and sell a house versus letting it languish on the market and lose tens of thousands of dollars per property.
3. Home staging becomes greener. In The International Association of Home Staging Professionals we see a trend towards eco-friendly home staging continuing as a viable market niche. Home stagers have specific inventory they can provide that is “green” to help a seller, builder or investor that wants to put their “green” foot forward and achieve their goal of marketing a product that truly has the environment at heart. There are even inventory lines devoted to providing a truly eco-friendly product created from recycled materials that any individual, builder or organization that states they are truly ecologically conscious should be focused on including with any home staging services they receive.
4. Home staging captivates mainstream media. There are currently no less than eight shows on HGTV devoted to the process of preparing a house for sale, and this trend will continue as long as the public finds value in learning what to do both inside and outside their home when getting ready to put it on the market. The key is that although many of the shows provide entertainment quality, what they miss is the ability for a viewer to truly be objective in their own house. Home stagers that can independently assess a house’s strength’s and weaknesses, and provide a concise and effective plan of action, will continue to be in demand.
5. Education and professional associations will become more important for screening qualified home stagers. With the influx of many people providing home staging services, we see a need for qualification of skills and education in order to weed out those that have not set up their businesses with professional standards.