In addition to home staging, try location staging
As you know, the process of selling a home now involves a bit of theater.
We’re not talking about real estate agents learning how to deliver a soliloquy about a 3/2 ranch like Sir Lawrence Olivier reciting Macbeth.
We’re talking about home staging.
The word is getting out that home staging is effective.
Some research says that buyers develop an opinion of a property within the first 15 seconds of walking in the door and they will tend to tour a furnished home longer than a vacant one.
And even though an unfurnished home shows lots of possibilities, nine out of 10 people apparently say they have difficulty imagining those possibilities. Most prefer to see furniture in the home to give them an idea of what it would look like with their own furniture.
Sure. Makes sense. Dressing up a home just like you would dress up any product you intend to sell is Home Selling 101.
Get rid of clutter. Get rid of worn furniture. Redo the kitchen cabinets. Fix the tiles in the shower.
But what about the location?
Why not dress that up as well?
With a real estate map search tool such as SpatialMatch, real estate agents and professionals can give home buyers a presentation on the value of the location of the property as well.
For example. Say the home is near a great park, or golf course or a desired middle school.
You can point that out on the geo-spatial map platform on SpatialMatch which will display the MLS of any property next to a map showing the location.
And on that map you can point out key amenities – parks, golf courses, schools, etc.
Okay, pointing out the location of great schools is also Home Selling 101.
But, with SpatialMatch’s enormous data widget with layers and layers of hyper-local information such as businesses, restaurants, highways, airports, boundaries, etc., you can go even deeper when staging the location of a particular property.
Say for example, Mrs. Home Buyer is a gym rat. Well, you can showcase all the local fitness studios in relation to the property under discussion. She’s going to like that.
What if her husband is a foodie? Loves his Italian food on Fridays and sushi on Saturdays. You can point out the location and proximity of restaurants as well.
Then there’s a teen, who’s probably not happy about anything. Show her how close the mega-mall is to the property and how she can overcome the angst of moving by meeting her friends at Urban Outfitters or Abercombie and Fitch.
Yes, there’s no denying it, home staging is critical. Home stagers can take a drab home and give it impact so that when the buyer walks through the home, they are not bored, they’re wowed.
But you can do the same with location – call it location staging. It could be that one factor that tips the scales toward a purchase.
And trust us, embedding the SpatialMatch map-based real estate search tool on your site is certainly easier than ripping out a bathtub.
