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Home Staging – I’ll Give You Two Guesses Why Your Home Isn’t Selling

Please welcome guest contributor to TeamFisher.com, Rachel Vanderveen, a Calgary real estate blogger and home stager who is writing an eight-part series of home staging advice for our blog.

There are only two reasons why real estate doesn’t sell: marketing and price. It’s a pretty wild concept, but stay with me here; I’m going to break this all down.

The Saskatoon real estate market attracts a huge pool of buyers, and most of them turn to the Internet first. The Internet is the gateway that Saskatoon home buyers usually take before they decide to come and see your home in person. So before I tell you about what you can do to stage your home to sell, I’m going to tell you what you need to do to make sure that qualified home buyers of Saskatoon real estate actually see the work you’ve put into staging your home.

Your first job is picking the right agent, who is going to expose potential Saskatoon real estate purchasers to your home in the most attractive and professional way possible. For this reason, you should make sure that you’re hiring an agent who is tech-savvy, and has a website that can expose your home in the best light possible. Next, you should make sure your agent takes photos of your home that are shot with a wide-angle lens, and provides a virtual tour or a video tour.

One of the most important services an agent can offer is feedback. I came into a home a couple years ago that just wasn’t selling. The feedback given to the agent was the same for almost every showing: “Buyers think the front entrance is too cramped and buyers don’t like that bonus room has been changed to a fourth bedroom.” Among other recommendations that I made, I specially recommended that they place a very large mirror in the front entry, and also that they restage the fourth bedroom into a bonus room. The place sold three days later.

You see, the vast majority of real estate agents out there employ a method of selling that I fondly refer to as “list and pray.” They come to your home, shoot pictures with their tiny point-and-shoot camera—that also functioned as their family camera when they took a trip to Disneyland—whip out a listing contract, get it signed, and then they go home and pray that it will sell. That’s where their job ends.

So now let me tie this whole thing together for you by going back to my original bold statement. There are only two reasons why Saskatoon real estate doesn’t sell: marketing and price. If your agent hasn’t done everything (s)he can to market your property by sending you a stager, taking wide-angle photos, advertising your property, and giving you feedback, well the only thing (s)he has to work with is price. Meaning, if your home doesn’t sell, your list-and-pray agent is going to come at you for a price reduction. So rather than using their own efforts to sell, they just want you to cut your price. However, if an agent comes to you after having provided staging, photos etc, and tells you that you’re over-priced, well, you probably are. Being that your agent has done everything they can on the marketing-side of selling, you can feel confident that if they tell you it’s price that needs to change, you need to get out your shears and take a little off the top.

So now we’ve cleaned our place up, and we’ve decided on a Saskatoon real estate agent. Next week, we’re going to talk more about what you need to do to your home to make sure it sells for more money than your neighbours. Stay tuned!

Rachel Vanderveen is a Calgary Real Estate agent specializing in Calgary condos, home staging and Calgary investment real estate.  But more importantly she is a mother to four adorable children, and an avid Real Estate Blogger. For more information on buying a Home in Calgary, or searching Calgary MLS Listings, visit her website here.