Playing by the New Real Estate Rules

Home stagers are the new power players in the real estate world and, according to real estate professionals, can be the answer to your real estate dreams.

Over the past few decades, the business of home staging, or property styling as it is sometimes called, has become increasingly important in the way this industry operates. We’ve come a long way from the days when sellers and their real estate agents put up a sign in a front yard, snapped a few black and white photos and published them in the weekly property listings section of the local papers. The internet, and the information age, have brought us to a place where selling property is much more like reality television than it was when prospective buyers simply drove around neighbourhoods looking for ‘For Sale’ signs.

Today, calling in professional home stagers is one of the first things selling agents recommend when home owners ask about selling. Statistically, everybody in the transaction walks away happier if the home in question has been professionally styled at the beginning of the process. Few investments pay off so well or so quickly in other financial niches. Styled homes sell much, much faster than unstyled ones also, so home staging is the winning ticket in the real estate lottery.

The reason professional home styling is so important is that real estate shopping has changed. Blame it on Bill Gates. From the moment humans around the globe got their hands on internet information, the world of shopping changed. These days, we don’t go to the local car yard to find a used car. Today we shop a much expanded market. We have all the information on cars around the nation from the moment we log on to one of the car-sales websites. When we pick a car, we already know its mileage, its maintenance records, and whether or not the vehicle has even been in an accident.

It is the same with insurance, t-shirts, towels from Egypt, and apple cider vinegar. In the past 20 years or so we’ve learned to shop from home and savvy real estate agents have changed the way properties are listed to take advantage of the newly informed market. Now, nearly 90 percent of home buyers begin their search on the internet. They begin the process of finding their new dream home based on photographic images served up on websites that reside just inside their home computer’s monitor.
What has that to do with home staging? It’s simply this: people are so inundated by beautiful properties and have so many choices, average homes don’t often make the cut. And the first cut is a huge one.

Before the buyer even calls a selling agent these days, they have narrowed the options available to them dramatically. They usually have a short list of properties that WOWed them in their first internet searches – the rest have fallen by the wayside. Nobody who is truly serious about getting top dollar for their property can afford not to have their home styled to sell in this new marketplace.

When sellers employ professional property stylists, their home is transformed into a place that appears to be ‘move-in ready’, which is one of the first requisites of today’s buyers. Your home stylist will, in amazingly short order, use the tools of his or her trade — including new furnishings, art, décor, and accessories — to create a place that looks as if it’s just starred in a photo shoot for House Spectacular. This is especially important because the photographs and videos your real estate expert uploads to the internet will do much of the selling for you. Your chances of making that first cut improve instantly.

Property stylists seem to have popped up on every corner in the Sydney area, making it challenging to know which stylist to choose. We suggest you go for experience. At Urban Chic Property Styling, our senior designer, Juliana Gowen, was a successful real estate selling agent for many years before she realised that her special insights could be better utilised to help make properties even more gorgeous and easier to sell. Now she lends her uncanny sense of knowing what the buyer wants to make your real estate investment pay off.

If you want to sell in today’s real estate market, you must play by new rules. Those rules can be overwhelming to people whose knowledge of the market is limited. Think of our design team and our home stagers as a flesh and blood navigational app to guide you through today’s digital real estate maze.