Scott Harris, January 1, 2025

Staging is a Great Marketing Tool.

Real estate agents talk a lot about staging. We tell sellers that staging is worth every penny. If we don’t think the situation calls for physical staging, we recommend virtual staging. And these days, I bet we’re using that 85-90% of the time.

When we look at little fixes, sellers have no problem agreeing to doing things like:

• Installing new light switches
• Doing touchups in kitchens
• Knocking Out discrete jobs like painting a room or two

Sellers start to push back on slightly bigger jobs like:

• Fully repainting an apartment
• Retiling a backsplash
• Refacing cabinets

But the biggest pushback? Large-scale furniture staging. Why so? Because it’s at least $15,000 for even a one-bedroom apartment, and can run into the mid 5-figures for a larger apartment. What if the unit sells right away? Does that make staging a waste of money, or did it sell precisely because of the staging? Other than adjusting price, staging is one of those things that we are sure glad to have in our toolbox. Alas, if every seller were on board with it!

Was It Staging, or Something Else?

Our deal of the month, which closed in late December 2024, was on West 30th. We flipped from marketing it for sale to putting in a tenant on three different occasions between 2020 and 2024. The market had not cooperated after COVID, and even then, buyers were not keen on our asking price.

Ultimately, we deployed two things that we believe helped the property sell: Staging, and a complete change in marketing tactics. Let’s look at both to decide which helped us get this listing sold more quickly, shall we?

What Staging Did We Do?

In the case of this loft listing, we recommended the seller paint the apartment from top to bottom in a color that was more neutral. And we recommended that we bring in staging furniture. The photo you see was the furniture from before we had put a tenant in place, and the tenant’s furniture (or empty space when they left) left buyers feeling deflated. The new furniture? Fabulous!

The 6-month commitment for full-apartment staging seemed unpalatable to our sellers for a while, and then they decided to take action. They spent $30,000—And we had an accepted offer within a week of the staging being installed.

Success, right? Was it staging that did the job? Or was it something else?

The Other Thing That Helped Properties Sell in 2024

As the staging went in, we planned to take the property off the market for about a two months. This would allow the apartment listing to come back on as a “fresh” listing, free of the taint of having been on the market for a few months. And with the staging, new photos, and new energy, we expected buyers to reengage with this property in a new way.

But what we had seen happening across many of our listings was strange: When we would take a property off the market for 60 days like this, we were getting off-market interest, and putting deals together before the units came back to the market.

First it happened on the Upper East Side. Then on the Upper West Side more than once. Should we have been surprised that buyers prefer to have a little more time to “discuss amongst themselves” rather than face the pressure of being potentially upended by other buyer interest?

In this case, a buyer agent reached out to us, because they had just lost out on another unit in the building, and saw that we’d taken our listing off the market. Could we still show it to them?

They were the first buyers to see it with the new staging. But they weren’t the last. We showed the property more than five times to different buyers while we remained off-market.

What Made The Difference?

• Was it a new price? No. We did not reduce the price at all from our on-market marketing.
• Was it seeing another unit go into contract in the building? Social proof can be a powerful aphrodisiac for buyers. Suddently seeing multiple units sell in the past few months, and losing a deal, make our first visitor post-staging setup quite intrigued.
• So it was the staging, right? Our feeling was that the new staging was so exciting and fresh, that the feeling of being a VIP and seeing the unit off-market, combined with the new paint and furniture put these buyers over the top.

So since it’s our blog, we gave you a trick question for our deal of the month. It wasn’t exactly one or the other, or either! Yes, staging was absolutely critical. The quiet marketing period was helpful, too.

But my sense was that, like many sales, timing was everything. A buyer fell in love with the building, and this property was calling their name on a higher floor, and at a higher price. But it didn’t matter. It was an opportunity to get an even better apartment at a good price, and that was that.

What we like to say to sellers is: “You only need one buyer.” Congrats to Brooke Davis from our team and our happy (and relieved) sellers for this recent closing! Happy New Year! – Scott & The HRT