4 Reasons Why Staging a Vacant Home is Critical

When you see before-and-after photos of spaces not staged versus staged, it’s easy to quickly become a believer in home staging! Vacant spaces, in particular, absolutely need to be staged for these 4 HUGE reasons…

1. An empty room EASILY SHOWS its flaws.

No room is perfect and empty ones especially are like walking around naked. Look at this room below which in its naked condition appears dark, dreary, and small.

BEST ITEMS FOR SHELF STYLING:

There’s no emotion…
There’s no connection…
The space feels cold…
The space feels abandoned…
But look what happens when this room becomes professionally staged

If you were not a “staging believer” before … I bet you are now! You don’t notice the darkness, or dreariness in a room staged and styled with warmth, texture, and well … fully dressed.

2. An empty room almost ALWAYS looks smaller than it really is.

People have no imaginations and let’s face it, how could buyers intuitively even know if furniture will fit into a space?

Empty rooms almost always appear smaller than they really are because without furniture … it has no frame of reference. Buyers would have no idea how to do a furniture layout in this tricky living space where it’s not easy to identify traffic flow.

Why allow your rooms to look smaller than they really are?

3. Empty rooms are cold and lifeless (i.e. not exactly an emotion you want buyers to feel!)

Imagine the cost of putting up a lifeless, cold, sterile photo online of your empty home! In our 2018 staging statistics of over 4,200 professionally staged homes, the average increase in value to the home due to professional staging was more than 8 percent.
What emotion do you feel when you look at this empty, unstaged room?

Vacant homes typically take twice as long to sell and go for even less than unstaged, “occupied” homes. So, imagine the true cost of not staging a vacant home!

As if those three compelling reasons were not enough, there’s a final and most important reason why you should never have an empty home on the market and that is…

4. Every room gives a stager the opportunity to add “emotional connections” to the space, so that buyers fall in love, aspire to live there and can actually imagine their family in that home.

Staging is merchandising and marketing in its purest form. Home stagers learn who the buyer demographic is and what they envision for a home will draw on those emotions with a carefully styled room.