What is a home stager, and do I need one?

In short, a home stager is someone you pay to come to your home to help you get it looking as good as it can be to attract a buyer. When selling your home, the goal is to make it as appealing as possible to the potential buyers visiting to view, so you achieve a quick sale at or above the asking price. 

A home stager will, in effect, ‘set the stage’ in your home, enhancing all aspects of the lifestyle a buyer can achieve when living there.

Home stagers work across two different property types: empty and lived-in. Empty homes can include new builds and homes being sold following probate, where the contents have been cleared, or mostly cleared, leaving the home looking a little unloved. 

Why home stage an empty house?

To answer this, we need to look at the psychology of home buying. Very few people buy a home purely on the measurement of the rooms and the post code. That’s the purview of property developers. Most people buy a home because it ticks the basic list of must-haves, which they have seen in the property details, and also because of how it makes them feel. An empty home, once previously lived in, with wallpaper and traces of long-gone artwork on the walls, can feel a bit creepy, to be fair. Dressing an empty home can overcome this, creating a warm and homely feel that people will, literally, buy into. A newbuild house or apartment, while clean and pristine, can feel a bit sterile and lifeless – a home stager will create an ambience and a sense of how it would be to live there, which is what people really need to feel. 

Why home stage an occupied home?

Home stagers can be really helpful if the homeowner is simply feeling overwhelmed by the whole concept of selling. We often see this in cases where an older couple are downsizing and have decades of family ephemera to clear out, or where the house is being sold for more distressing reasons, such as divorce, financial needs or even job relocation. In these cases, the homeowner doesn’t love the idea of selling, perhaps, so struggles to focus on the best actions to take to make their home irresistible. A third party home stager will be sensitive to all of this and help make that decision-making simpler.

The second reason for bringing in a home stager in an occupied home is if it’s just not selling and there is no clear reason why. Sometimes homes can tick all the practical boxes – location, size, number of rooms, price, etc – but just not grab the buyers’ interest enough to encourage an offer. In this case, it’s often because they simply don’t feel the right vibe when they look around the property. It may be that the homeowners have a rather unusual sense of home decor, or because there’s simply so much furniture and clutter viewers can’t see past it, or something more indefinable – but as it’s the home stager’s job to figure it out, you can rely on them to resolve the issue. 

What is the difference between a home stager and an interior designer?

Where an interior designer works hard to personalise your home, making it work to your individual taste, style and needs, a home stager works to remove personality, creating a space with the broadest possible appeal to potential buyers.

Home staging comes with a cost, of course, but if you think of it as an investment, not an overhead, the returns can be more than worth it.

Eddie – Friday 24th March 2023. (Picture used from Beaumont Road, Chorlton Green).