Home Staging. The revolutionary real estate insite marketing tool arrives in Spain with a bang.
Multiply x7 with Home Staging
The first thing is to differentiate the concepts of Home Staging and decoration. No, they are not the same. While the latter is done with the aim of achieving comfort for the inhabitants of the house and is carried out taking into account their preferences and tastes, the Home Staging aims to make a house attractive to prospective buyers or tenants if it is a rental.
As you will understand, we will have to make it attractive to a very wide public with very different personal tastes, hence a neutral and timeless style that appeals to most people. So, if you like pistachio green on the walls, it will be fine to use it in the decoration of the house you are going to live in, but if you do not intend to home staging your house to sell or rent it, forget about green and look for white, cream, grey, etc. tones. Remember that we want to show a neutral, luminous and diaphanous space.
And what is the origin of all this? Home Staging is a technique that was born in the 1970s in the United States by Barb Schwarz, a visionary who realised that if she prepared houses for sale she could sell them sooner and better. In our country, this discipline is still very young but we are working to make it known and to recognise the great added value it brings.
Yes, yes, but to get to the point, what is home staging? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it is a real estate marketing tool that consists of “staging” the property where it is applied, highlighting its strengths and minimising its weaknesses. Basically, what we aim to do is to make a property attractive to potential buyers, so that they see themselves living in it and want to do so.
You may be wondering why such a staging is necessary, if the issue of sensations and impressions is so important when deciding whether to buy or rent a property. Well, here comes one of the most interesting information tips on this subject.
Our unconscious mind processes most of the information that comes to us and that is, in the end, what inclines us to make one decision or another. In computer language, our conscious mind is capable of taking in, at most, 50 bits per second. However, in that same time it processes some 11 million bits unconsciously. Here is a link to a very short but very revealing video about what I have just said: Networks: the expert and wise unconscious mind.
When someone visits our home, their unconscious begins to process those millions of bits of data that come to them through visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile or emotional sensations. Although consciously rationalising things such as the layout of the house, the state of the doors or the orientation of the house, the information that really floods your brain is the warmth of the natural light on your skin or the feeling of wellbeing that the place transmits to you. And it is precisely to this type of information that home staging directs its activity. For example, an attractively dressed table invites you to imagine sharing meals with your loved ones in that room, while a bare table may even go unnoticed by the prospective buyer.
And another striking fact: the intention to buy a property is decided in the first 90 seconds. That first impression is fundamental to get a potential client. If the emotions that flood the visitor when they walk through the door are positive, they will tend to see the rest of the property from a more optimistic perspective, whereas if negative feelings are generated, it is unlikely that they will be predisposed to like the rest of the visit.
And now tell me, is it or is it not important to apply home staging in a property for sale or rent? Would you do it with yours? I hope so.
