A part of any professional home stagers job description is selling their services. Part of selling is showing how your services add value and create a win win situation for your clients.
The majority of clients enjoy hearing and analysing the statistics around home staging and its results or return on investments for vendors. There is a lot of literature on the internet that the great stats that are floating about to support the use of home staging and pre sale property styling, the Real Estate Staging Association (RESA) has a yearly publication as do a few other American and Canadian Associations.
However presenting off shore data to clients that has been derived from what they may consider to be a completely unrelated market often results in objections and questions about the transferability of the data.
The best way to counter this is to collect your own data. When you collect your own rigorous and consistent statistics based on local sales and your workmanship there can be little challenge to their relevancy.
What to collect? When collecting data for your personal statistics the more information you gather on each property the better. So create yourself an excel spreadsheet or similar and for each property aim to collect the following data as a good place to start.
- Vendors price expectation prior to staging
- Agents expectation of price prior to styling
- Date on the market
- Date of sale, make sure this is consistent, such as unconditional exchange.
- Length of time on the market
- Starting price
- Any price reductions (these should be rare with a well staged and well priced property)
- Sale price
- Investment in staging infinitives
- Investment in final styling and hire
Not all properties are going to have all of this data available, nor are all these categories going to apply to every property, however this will give you a create template to begin your data process.
By using a spreadsheet based product to collect the data you will ensure easy analysis of your stats at any stage.
Once you are under-way you can then start to reference these statistics in the selling stage of your consultations and quotes, for both agents and vendors. The more data you collect, the more power they will have.
