Stage To Sell

6 Days, 6 Offers, $21K Over Asking: Another Los Angeles Home Staging Success Story!

Posted on 24 March 2009

I do a lot of work for a very successful and hard-working Realtor who pays me to do a Staging Consultation on pretty much every one of his listings. He markets this as a value-added service that his clients get in return for listing their home with him. Everyone wins: the seller feels like they’ve gotten a valuable service at no cost, and the Realtor is happy because his listings always look great and sell quickly without him ever having to “be the bad guy.”

With most consultations, I spend a couple of hours at the property, email out my detailed, room-by-room Staging report and don’t usually hear anything more about it. (The whole point of a consultation is providing a low cost, do-it-yourself option for those who may not be able to afford full Staging services.) Sometimes I get a followup question here and there, and every once in awhile I check out the MLS photos of the homes just to make sure the sellers are following my advice, but that’s generally the extent of it.

But sometimes the results are so remarkable that they warrant an e-mail like the one I received yesterday from my client, telling me that a Westchester home we recently did a consultation for had been listed at $674,000, it had 6 offers in 6 days, and was now in escrow at $695,000!

Excuse me, but aren’t we in a recession here?! And yet these are similar to the results we were seeing at the height of the L.A. real estate frenzy.

Now when you look at the photo below, please note that I did not Stage this property, nor did I take the photo. I merely gave the seller a detailed list of what she could do, using just what she already had in the home, to Stage it herself! That rug was folded up at the bottom of her linen closet. The vase was in another room. The elements were all there, but they just hadn’t been properly put together. But this motivated seller followed my directions and got herself many of the benefits of a Staged home at a fraction of the cost!

Now I’d call that a win/win!