Stager vs. Stager
Not everyone has the luxury of moving out before putting their home on the market. Especially in tough economy, we are seeing an increasing demand to stage occupied homes. We try to work with owners’ existing furnishing, thus saving them the money from renting furnishings from us. Occupied homes are tougher to stage than vacant homes, the design process is more involved since we’d have to consider the owner’s furnishing and make sure the staging is practical to live with.
Here is an example of a condo in Mountain View we recently staged. The property was previous on the market, staged by another staging company, and after more than half year, it was still on the market. Then… the Realtor was changed, and we were asked to freshen up the place. We removed some of owner’s bulky, dated items, brought in few contemporary furnishings, injected brighter colors here and there, and voilà! The place was sold in a week with multiple offers at almost $30,000 over the listing price.
Does staging really work? 
Our staging combined with our complimentary eye-popping photography/virtual tour service give you the winning edge!
Here is the comparison between the previous stager’s work (left) and ours (right):
(More info on this property, here is the virtual tour)
When it comes to timing or evaluating the real estate market, I will leave that to the Realtors and other experts to dissect and analyze, from my “Stager’s” point of view, we see the demand of staging goes up and down in respond to many factors; in the uneasy economy of today, the demand for our service actually picked up quite a bit, and as people get ready for the holidays like the Memorial Day we just had, the demand of staging falls sharply; and when K-12 schools goes on break, having kids hanging around at home definitely alter the parents’ plans on putting the house on the market.
Last two weeks we were crazy busy with staging, this week, we’ll be crazy busy with de-staging on top of staging.
Time is tough, thieves are also getting creative.
