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Throughout my entire career, I have been a huge advocate for staging and identifying where the highest return can be achieved with the smallest investment. Staging can mean different things to different people and the level of preparation for the market varies from property to property, and also from client to client.
We recently represented clients selling their family home and it was an amazing property – they raised their entire family there and were the original buyers in the 1960s. It was a fantastic property on an absolutely incredible lot. They interviewed a number of realtors and the feedback from most of them was ‘It's a builder lot so don't do anything. Just put it on the market and sell as is,’ But we went to look at it, and when we looked at the value of a land transaction (somewhere around 2.7 million) and at what's for sale in terms of new builds in the market (they're closer to $6 million or higher), we thought that there was more of an opportunity in that mid-range. So we put together a plan where the sellers invested about $100,000 in staging – some improvements to the property and dealing with some known issues – and we presented it to market beautifully. It sold in one day for $3.3 million, which represented about a $600,000 premium to the land and they made a $500,000 return on a $100,000 investment.
Our approach to staging is definitely not formulaic. We work with a number of stagers who have expansive warehouses with tens of millions of dollars of inventory collectively and we draw a map to ultimately put together the best possible visual option for each individual home. A really curated collective of beautiful content to either augment or replace existing items in one's home is really key.
Staging is a similar thing. You could have a spectacular home that served you and your family incredibly well but now you've transitioned through that life cycle and you're looking to downsize. The reality is your likely purchasers are another young family and the decor when you initially moved in is probably very different than what people are looking at today on HGTV. Market preparation is one of our core strengths, and in each of the cases, we ultimately took over the listing, prepared the property, and staged it and the staging made a vast difference in the overall presentation and successful sale. In this day and age the importance of staging is paramount, it's a visual business in many ways, and our core responsibility as marketers of the property and representatives of our client's homes is to get people through the property.
For more information, please contact Kevin Crigger at 416-837-3296 or kevin@kevincrigger.com
Kevin Crigger is one of the exclusive agents representing the Toronto real estate market as a member of the Haute Residence Real Estate Network. View all of his listings here.
