Home staging is the act of preparing a private residence prior to going up for sale in the real estate marketplace. The goal of staging is to sell a home quickly, and for the most money possible by making a home appealing to the highest number of potential buyers. Staging focuses on improving a property to make it appeal to the largest number of buyers by transforming it into a welcoming, appealing, and attractive product for sale. Many people believe that staging raises the value of a property by way of reducing the home's flaws, depersonalizing, decluttering, cleaning, improving condition items, and landscaping. For vacant homes, staging furniture is used to create a living space the buyer can "see" themselves living in. Properly executed staging leads the eye to attractive features while minimizing flaws.

History

U.S.

Since the 1970s, real estate agent professionals have used staging as a marketing tool in the United States. Not until the 1990s did this real estate trend become a separate endeavor adopted by professional designers and decorators and real estate agents. More recently, the trend of do-it-yourself home staging has become popular.

Staging is increasingly viewed by many in a competitive market as a necessary step to take before selling a home, and many home sellers use the services of a professional home stager or a real estate agent with staging experience and expertise to help them stage their homes before it goes on the market.

U.S. research (based on surveys of real-estate agents, not on rigorously collected data on prices, and not peer-reviewed or published in peer-review journals) states that home staging can reduce a listing's time on the market by one third to half, and could fetch as much as 10-15% more than an empty home or a home not properly staged.

The popularity of home staging has led to the creation of home staging courses that educate real estate professionals about the home staging process. However, home staging is an unregulated field. There are no industry standards or official boards to give accreditation to instructors or schools.

All text of this article available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).