The Power of a Vacant Stage

The Power of a Vacant Stage

Transcript:

(00:10):

I hope everyone is having a great start to the fall. I just love fall weather. It's my favorite. Colorado in the fall is just so beautiful. And crisp, and when I got married in September and it's when my birthday is, so fall's always a really good time of year for us. And I have to say, since we are back in school in person, whoo! It's made me pretty happy as a mom to get back into the old routine. So loving it, I hope everyone else is doing just as well. Today, I want to talk about the power of the vacant stage. So when it comes to a vacant home, when I say vacant, I mean, we're talking about a house that is totally empty or at least they're special. They're, you know, your important rooms are completely empty. And those houses, you know, even new builds like brand new houses, beautiful homes, totally updated, perfect colors schemes, They tend to sit on the market. They just don't sell as fast. And the reason is, because buyers can't visualize living there. So what I want to kind of go over today is how a vacant stage impacts the experience your buyer has. And also how a vacant stage can help get your home sold faster because it does a lot of really important things.

(01:42):

Okay. So the first thing, that was long. So what

(01:48):

Vacant staging does is it creates spatial awareness. So when we stage a home, we're bringing in full furniture, right? If it's a living room, it's going to have a couch, two chairs, coffee table, side tables, art, you know, rugs. It's going to look like a living room. Why that important, why that is important and why it's important to actually bring in full-scale real life furniture, not just a couple of pillows by the fireplace is because it gives buyers of, you know, the confidence that their stuff's going to fit. So sometimes that's actually a really big concern, right? They walk into that primary bedroom. If it's empty, it's like, oh no, is my bed going to fit in here? Is that King gonna fit in here? When we stage it, you know, we put a queen bed or a King bed. We alleviate it, alleviate that problem.

(02:39):

So we assure buyers that their stuff will fit. We provide the solution before becomes a problem, right? It's like, okay, we walk in, this is a great living room. It's the perfect size. It has enough room for everyone to sit and gather around a coffee table, you know, for game nights. So great. So that is a really huge aspect of why bringing in real furniture and doing a room properly is important and why it impacts a sale. So we don't lose, lose buyers over concerns of whether their stuff is going to fit. Okay. So the next thing that vacant staging does is it allows buyers to visualize living there. So in a recent survey, a national association of realtor survey, 77% of buyers said it was easier to envision their lives in a home when it had stuff in it versus a vacant home, right?

(03:36):

So it's really hard to connect to a dining room or a dining space when you don't have a place to sit. Right? So once that dining room has a table and chairs, people start picturing Thanksgiving dinner, there, they start imagining gathering of their family at that table. You know what their life will actually look like in that space. It comes alive when there is stuff there. Okay. So that's really important. If they start imagining their life there, they're more likely to put in an offer and that's what you want. Right. That's the goal. The next thing that vacant staging does for you or can do to you, you know, do for you is, well, I guess let me clarify. When we do a strategic vacant stage package like we do with Modern Interior Staging Company, we are going to focus on the rooms that buyers care about.

(04:34):

So it's strategic in the sense we don't need to just go in at stage every home or sorry, every room in your house in order to help that house get sold. There are specific rooms that buyers really care about and that's the rooms we focus on. So in our initial package, what you're going to get is staging of the entry, right? We need to make sure we make a good first impression. We know that's really important when in all things, right. First impression lingers, right? And then living room, dining area, kitchen, primary bedroom, and primary bath, you know, that bedroom. Some people leave out that bedroom, guess who's writing the offer where they're sleeping? They care about that primary bedroom, right? If there's you know, a secondary bedrooms down to the basement, as far as where my kid's stay, where the guest stays, it's not as big of a deal.

(05:28):

That primary bedroom is important. They want to know they can get their bed in there too. Right. Going back to that. So we focus on those rooms, additional add on rooms would be if it works with the, the target market that you're in. So if you have a more luxury level home, there's a higher expectation for an office, a formal dining room. Some of those rooms get added on, but only if it makes sense for your demographic, your market and your home, so that is really important. Let's see the next thing, we're on number four, is that when we do a vacant stage or what vacant staging does for you is that it targets the right demographic for your home while also broadening appeal. Okay. So we want to bring buyers in that obviously love the style of your home. So if you have a modern or contemporary home, the staging that should go in it should complement the, the, you know, the house, the house itself.

(06:30):

So we don't want to take a traditional home and put a bunch of modern stuff in it. We want to make sure that we're selling the house the buyers are going to be buying and appeals to people. Like if it's a modern home people who want modern homes come into that, now it also broadens appeal in a couple ways. So let's say the style of your home, isn't a trendy contemporary look, right. So what we need to do is kind of off set, maybe a niche, like here's an example. You can look at this picture where it was a Mediterranean home with tile, which was beautiful. It's just not, you know, currently trending and on buyer’s lists. So what we need to do is take that style and kind of neutralize it to appeal to more buyers, right? If we appeal to more buyers, there's more buyers putting in offers and coming to visit your house.

(07:24):

Right? The other thing that staging can do to broaden appeal is neutralizing other elements of the home, such as your paint color. So usually I'm recommending paint. Sometimes that's you know, that works, we paint it and it freshens it up. And it's neutral, other times like in this picture that you can take a look at, it was really vaulted ceilings. That was just going to be too big of a job for this particular seller. So how do we neutralize yellow walls? And we brought in, you know, lighter color furniture to really show that this is a really beautiful room. In a higher price point, this was in the 700,000 range. So we don't want people to get distracted or hung up on a paint color. Maybe that's not theirs if we can't, you know, their favorite, if we can't, if we can help it.

(08:15):

So that's another thing the staging does that as far as broadening appeal. And then another thing that it does when we're doing that is like, you know, let's see like, like older home, like we have, you know, you always have these historic areas in a town, in our neighborhood. We, we have, you know, in Colorado we have some older homes that are just beautiful and people love them, right? Oh, it has charm. So, you know, quaint, I love the character and that's great and buyers love that, but they also need to see that it fits their modern lifestyle. So in this example, if you look  at this picture, you can see that the house was one of our Old Colorado City homes,  a little more small, you know, the rooms were smaller. So if we didn't put staging in that, it's it had a hard -

(09:08):

Actually, we staged it after it'd been listed, it was having a hard time selling because it didn't show off the room as really livable. It felt kind of small. So we need to modernize a home when necessary, while still highlighting some of the charm and character that buyers are looking for in that type of home. Okay. Let's see. Number five on the list, is what vacant staging can do is change confusing spaces into assets. So if you have a room in your house that is just odd, right? It happens. I don't know. It was long and narrow. I don't know. I can think of a house that had a sink in a room, which is random, right? You know, or maybe like an odd shaped you know, bedroom. It has like a, in this one house, actually, as an example, it had a little kind of - it jutted out.

(10:04):

It was an upgraded house. It was an older home originally upgraded. So just having kind of a weird layout, you know, if you can take, if, you know, you can look at that and we can give purpose to that space. Whether it becomes like a reading nook or a yoga room. Or if I was thinking maybe an artist studio, right. We start engaging kind of with buyers and showing off the potential of that space rather than just a, oh, that and that house with a weird room now suddenly, oh, it's that house with the yoga room. Okay. Or the artist studio. So you start giving buyers solutions to those maybe challenging spaces and it can actually really excite them too, it gives them purpose too, and how to use it. And then finally, what we'll just hit on and for today is that vacant staging, what it can do, is sell a lifestyle.

(10:57):

So when buyers are looking at your home, they want to visualize their lives there. And, and really a lot of times they're looking for that next level, right? We're leveling up, you know, in my new house, I'm going to have, you know, these kinds of parties, or I want this room to have my girlfriends over so we can drink wine and have a book club. You know, this is where my family's all gonna hang out and we're going to have game night. And so it's not just, oh, there's a couch that fits in here. It's how I'm going to use the space and what it means for how I'm going to live in that home and the experience of living in that home. So vacant staging can also do that. So that is a little summary on some of the, of the power of vacant staging and what it does to help sell your listing. So I hope you enjoyed that and thanks for stopping by. And if you have any questions, feel free to give me a call or email me, and we can chat about your upcoming sale of your home. So have a great day and enjoy the fall! Bye.