Understanding Your Buyers When Selling Real Estate

When selling real estate, Real Estate Agents are using a wide variety of marketing tools to attract buyers to visit the house and then hoping that one or more would put an offer out. Home Staging continues and even increasingly becomes one of the most powerful tool in the most successful real estate agent’s marketing tools box. Nowadays, where the internet has taken over such an important role for buyers to scope out houses they want to visit – 94% of home buyers search online first – the right preparation of the visual appeal for the right buyers group is the most critical to generate the traffic into a house.

Thus it is critical to dial in your buyer when preparing your home for sale. A deep understanding of who the ideal buyer is – what is their demographic, what is their psychographic, why would someone buy your house, who is living in the neighborhood, what food do they like, where do they go shopping, … – is critical to ensure that the presentation of the home appeals to the right buyer group.

Our company focused on this topic of target staging and lifestyle merchandising during an advanced staging techniques and marketing training course held by HGTV star Matthew Finlason of “The Stagers” earlier on this month. With lifestyle merchandising our company combines research, analysis of the buyers demographic and psychographic profiles, house style, and function needs with our design aesthetics. Once all that research has been done it is critical to know how to translate this information into a  meaningful and successful staging design plan that these buyers feel attracted to. When staging, we are telling a story keeping in mind that particular lifestyle that these buyers are dreaming of, rather than neutralizing it. Every item that we use in our story is carefully and thoughtfully selected.

Often there are a couple of target buyer groups a home needs to appeal to.  A home needs to be staged differently for the young professional than for the older retired couple who is downsizing. We learned how to successfully incorporate target staging even for opposite spectrum demographics into one staging design installation, instead of going the plain vanilla neutralization route.

The evolution of home staging is currently growing up further. Staging for sale is still a young industry and is changing to be even more effective. While until recently home staging was about making a house appealing to the widest variety of buyers tastes, the industry is moving up to the next level of better understanding the target buyers and focusing on what these buyers want. Real Estate Staging is now about leveling the design installation with the dreams these buyers aspire to and our company is right on top of this trend. 

We recently staged a home, after it was on the market for 155 days, using these techniques. An offer close to asking price was received within just 2 days after staging. Success stories like these bring the biggest joy for me to staging. Helping a family to finally being able to move on with their lives.