Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Presentation is key in staging luxury homes for sale
With opulent sites like MacDonald Highlands in Henderson, The Ridges in Summerlin and Southern Highlands estates, Las Vegas offers an expansive luxury home selection for affluent individuals looking for their next home purchase, or those interested in selling their home.
Collaborators Darin Marques, founder of the Darin Marques Group at Huntington & Ellis, and Heidi Carlsen, home staging expert with Stately Home Staging, have their fingers on the direct pulse of Southern Nevada luxury real estate and understand just what helps sell these properties to high-earning individuals. The answer lies in the presentation. These two partnering experts weigh in on the key elements of home staging and what it means for both the Realtor and designer standpoint.
Marques weighs in on how to seal the real estate deal with proper staging:
When showing a home, a retail-like experience can make all the difference. This can include how the space is lit, what it smells like and, perhaps most importantly, how it is staged with furniture and various fixtures. All these factors play into the overall ambiance and can help the potential buyer remember a property that much more and, perhaps, engage in buying it.
Consider a completely blank canvas — an empty home — versus one that is staged well. On larger and luxury homes when they are not staged, people walk in and envision where a couch or table may go. It can be all a mystery — visually — at that point.
Staging takes out the prospective buyers’ guesswork, giving them an idea how the spaces may be utilized and optimized. It is no different than folks walking into a model home. There is a certain element of excitement that is generated in seeing a space filled out.
As for the agent-stager relationship, it’s best for everyone to essentially stay in their own lanes while working cohesively together to get a property sold. Agents will often work with a trusted staging vendor, where their opinions matter the most come decision time. In some scenarios, the stager can interact directly with the home seller, having immediate access to the professionals sprucing their space.
When looking at the complete transaction, staging is one of the tools in the toolbox that would accelerate the sale of a home. A success story among many, our team recently had a $5 million-plus Southern Highlands home go under contract in 30 days, whereas the typical days on market for this price point is 97 days. I have no doubt that staging was a vital factor in making this happen.
No agent out there should be a jack of every single trade. A trusted stager is part of the team, and I sell a full team experience to buyers out there.
Carlsen notes that clients should design with selling in mind:
When it comes to coordinating a home staging, it’s really a designer’s job to sell a feeling. The successful sale of the home hinges on that very palpable emotional connection that a potential buyer senses the second they step into a house. Home staging plays an essential part in the decision-making psychology and on a subconscious level allows someone to genuinely start envisioning themselves in their future home.
This is especially true for luxury homes that come with the multimillion-dollar price tag. Even in today’s hot market, where you hear of homes selling very quickly, higher-tier properties with an extremely high value still tend to have a slower turnaround time when compared with the average home sale.
Sometimes, an original home design has the pristine location and beautiful architecture, but a not enough functionality to live up to modern living needs. As staging experts, we are skilled in “solving” a challenging space, which is vital to show any interested purchaser just how much value they can squeeze out of every square inch of their home.
The result will speak for itself, as we’ve seen that homes that are not staged can spend 70 percent more time on the market.
Darin Marques is a luxury home specialist based in Las Vegas and founder of the Darin Marques Group at Huntington & Ellis, A Real Estate Agency.
Heidi Carlsen is a designer at Stately Home Staging where she leads design efforts to transform luxury home settings into beautiful living spaces aimed to allure potential home buyers.