Anyone who has sold a house before knows the trick of baking cookies or boiling apple juice before the prospective buyers show up, to give them that cozy at-home feeling. Now the competitive California market has taken the walk-through ritual to the next level.
Real estate brokers and homeowners are hiring decorating experts to size-up their home to prep it for resale. They might pack the homeowner’s possessions in storage and rent furniture if need be, to make the home more appealing.
Although realtors don’t want to go on record on what they call home staging, they do admit that sizing up a home’s potential these days involves more than curb appeal.
“What the house looks like on the outside is still extremely important,” says one broker. “That’s the snapshot. The next snapshot is when they walk through the front door.” If the prospects ooh and ahh when they step inside or feel they could plop on the couch and feel right at home, it’s a shorter trip to the bargaining table.
Most homeowners don’t have decorating sense, so realty services bring in the real thing to create that picture book fantasy. Staged homes have been prepped and propped to help get buyers the highest possible price.
Home glamour mags have been upstyling homes to be photographed for decades. There’s no accounting for taste, and frustrated magazine art directors have been known to haul out movie star and celebrity homeowners’ possessions, redressing the home with chic wares.
The fact that this rite has moved to selling the home is a natural progression, due to today's competitive housing market.
When prospects enter the ritual of entering the home and see the iconic trappings of prosperous living, it differentiates the house and improves the chance of a sale.
If nothing else, it gives the new homeowner a picture book fantasy to live up to.
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