Does Staging Really Help Homes Sell?

Home staging is essential if you want to sell for top dollar. This is what staging does for your home sale.

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Why would someone bother to stage their home? To put it simply, it gets results. We recently talked to Patricia Ebrahimi with Show Smart Staging about home staging and its effect on real estate transactions.

The main purpose of staging a home is to facilitate the fastest and most profitable sale of your home. The first step to getting your home staged begins at an initial consultation, where a stager will determine your home’s advantages and disadvantages. Every home has both.

Home staging is not the same as interior decorating. Interior decorating is more personal and done to your personal tastes and liking because you're going to live in it. Conversely, home staging is about appealing to the broadest array of potential buyers in your target market to make them fall in love with the home.

Staging works by focusing on the home’s advantages and focusing away from its disadvantages. If a home is vacant, only key rooms like the first floor and master suite need to be staged.

Staging helps produce an emotional connection with buyers.

The return on investment for staging is huge. It’s the strongest marketing tool in real estate, according to Patricia. It produces the emotional connection with buyers that a vacant or unstaged home simply can’t.

The whole process only takes a few days from the initial consultation to the full staging. The bottom line is that if you want the most profit from your sale in the shortest amount of time, staging is a must.

If you have any questions for Patricia about staging your home or you’d like to have a consultation with her team, give her a call at (757) 619-9789. If you have any other questions about real estate, you can always give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

How to Price Your DC Home to Maximize Your Net

Price is one of the five most important factors when selling your house. Here’s how we help sellers find the right price that will earn them top dollar in our market.

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Choosing the right price for your home is one of the most important decisions you make when you sell it. In fact, it’s one of the five key factors that determines whether your home will sell or not. The other factors include the condition of the home, the market you’re selling in, your motivation, and the quality of the marketing your home receives.

As for pricing your home, you have to think in terms of competition. Since you’re not alone in the market and homebuyers are comparison shoppers, you want to attract buyers with a compelling price for your home. These buyers are shopping online and they’re shopping for value, but how do they determine it? Since they shop by comparison to determine value, they will compare homes online and compare them when they physically come to the home.

They will compare the features, benefits, and price of your home with the features, benefits, and price of similar houses that have recently sold or are currently on the market.

When we help you come up with a price for your home, our job is to anticipate what buyers will be thinking. We need to look at comparable homes and the current competition, but more importantly, we need to look at what actually sold and the price it sold at. Many houses are unique, so we’ll never find an exact match, which makes the task a bit harder. For that reason, we need to add and subtract from the price based on variations from house to house.

Our job is to anticipate what buyers are thinking.

There is almost always a range of prices for which a home sells, and we aim to sell your house at the very top of that range. Our team will take a look at the house to establish that range and even consult other experienced agents to come up with a price range. This information is especially important compared to automated data online, which can be helpful at times, but it can also be extremely misleading at times. You need to take it with a huge grain of salt. Even Zillow says they have errors in their valuation that can be 10% high down to 10% low.

I hope you found this information helpful when considering a price for your home sale. If you have any questions for our team or you’re looking to buy a home in the Washington D.C. area, give us a call or send us an email. We’d love yo help you out.

Days on Market

Every time we have an open house, I'm asked how many days the home has been on the market. Nobody asked this question 10 years ago, but it's an important part of real estate now. Here's why.

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Today I wanted to talk about how a house's days on market impacts the sale.

When we do open houses for our clients, we meet a lot of buyers, and they often ask us how many days the house has been on the market. It's a funny question that nobody asked 10 years ago, but it has become a very important factor in real estate.

When I answer, I always give a qualified response and say, "At this particular price, the house has been on the market for 10 days," or,  "With me as an agent, this house has been on the market two weeks," or something along those lines.

The reason to qualify this answer is because days on market is something you shouldn't take at face value. Some houses may show many days on market, and in some markets, that's very normal and really doesn't mean anything. Other homes may have many days on market, and that could mean that there's something wrong with the house. It may have been priced or presented wrong, and the buyer should take that into account.

Don't take days on market at face value; ask your agent to explain.

If there is an accumulation of days, the buyer should ask the agent to explain days on market. As you may know, some sellers play a trick with days on market by taking the property off the market, waiting until the calendar stops, and putting it back on the market.

Always ask your agent to explain days on market for a house you like, and don't discount a house entirely because you see a lot of days on market.

If you have any questions about days on market or about the D.C. real estate market, give me a call or send me an email. I'd be happy to help.

8 Inexpensive Home Staging Tips

Staging your home can increase its value by up to 10% and can cut your time on market by a third. These 8 tips will help you maximize your staging at very low cost.

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Staging creates an illusion in the eyes of the buyer, because buyers buy on emotion, and they like to feel good about what they're seeing. You want to stage the home in a way that gives buyers the emotion they want and makes them feel comfortable buying your home.

Buyers want to picture themselves living in your home.

Staging can actually increase the home's value by up to 10% and can cut your time on the market down by a third. Here are our eight tips to maximize the effect:

1. Make a great first impression. What does the front door look like, and what does the buyer see when they first walk in? Paint the front door and put some fresh flowers out front.
2. Depersonalize the home. Buyers want to see themselves living in the home, so take your family photos down.
3. Make the necessary repairs. Have a repairman fix the little things like dripping faucets or any little flaws throughout the house that are visible to buyers.
4. Clean the house top-to-bottom. Have the house be the cleanest it has even been, because clean sells!
5. Make the house fresh. You don't want the smell of dogs, cigarettes, or cooking that you don't notice anymore, because buyers will pick up on it right away.
6. Remove some furniture. Less is more when it comes to showing a house, and frankly, most houses have too much furniture. Make sure the buyer can see the space.
7. Clean the windows. Sparkling windows make a good impression and let more light into the house.
8. Lighting is important. People respond well to a well-lit house, so make sure all your fixtures have working bulbs.

I hope you find these tips helpful. If you have any questions about staging or selling your home, feel free to give me a call or send me an email. I'd be happy to help!

6 Repairs That Will Make a Difference in Your Home Sale

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We always advise our clients to prepare their home well for the market. After all, your home is entering a price war and a beauty contest.

That’s why we like to focus on the high return on investment activities for our clients - the things that can be done easily and without a lot of expense, and can earn thousands of dollars more on the sale of your house. There are six main areas we’d like to tell you about that will make a difference in the sale of your home:

1. Paint. Painting is the best thing you can do. Paint your home all the way throughout if necessary and be sure you use a neutral color. Return on investment for painting is 800%. You can’t beat that.
2. Clean. A clean house sells. Polish it up, and don’t forget the insides and outsides of the windows.
3. Declutter. You’ll want to remove a lot of items from the house, including pieces of furniture. We typically advise you to replace certain pieces with other, more contemporary pieces. We can also bring in a stager to help you with this process. As a guiding principle when putting a house on the market, just remember that less is more.
4. Have your carpets professionally cleaned.
5. Have sufficient lighting.
6. Pay attention to the curb appeal. What does the buyer see as they’re driving up? You want a freshly-painted front door and freshly-cut lawn. And don’t forget about the rest of the landscaping. It doesn’t have to be a lot, just make sure everything is neatly trimmed.

Thank you for your time. If you’re thinking of selling, please give us a call or send us an email, as we’d love to help you.  

5 Tips for a Successful Home Sale in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area

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Selling your home can be overwhelming, but there are five simple steps you can take to ensure a successful home sale.

1. Understand the market you are in. You need to know how many homes are on the market, how many are selling every month, and how many new listings are coming on the market. You should also know if you are in a buyer’s or seller’s market and what the average days on market is. Having all of this information will help you make the right decisions for a successful sale. 

2. Prepare your home well for the market. Once you go on the market, buyers will compare your property to all the other homes on the market, as well as homes that have recently sold. If your home is prepared and presents well, you will have a successful sale.

3. Make your home accessible for showings. Buyers and agents will be eager to get into the home and see it at their convenience. Make sure you have a system in place to set up showings for any interested buyers.

4. Price your home strategically. Deciding your list price is extremely important. The list price will either position your home to succeed or sit on the market based on the competition. Price your home competitively based on current listings and recently sold, similar properties.

5. Hire a strong listing agent. The point of a listing agent is to net you the most money possible. Don’t count on a buyer’s agent to give you a smooth closing, as their responsibility is to the buyer. A listing agent will represent your best interests during the transaction.

If you have any questions about selling your home, give us a call or send us an email. We would be happy to help you!