Houses stay on the market longer
Selling a home is different from what it used to be. Even in the traditionally hot California market, houses are staying in the market twice as they did in 2021. The combination of still-high mortgage rates and home prices that refuse to go down significantly makes realtors’ jobs more challenging.Â
What does it mean, moneywise, that a house stays longer in the market? For example, if the average price for a home in California is $801,190 and the mortgage rate is 6.24%, every 24 hours a house remains unsold is roughly the equivalent of $137.19 in lost interest for the owner.Â
You need to pique interest in your listings
With these numbers, it makes sense to use every legal trick available to get more interest in your listings, more visits, and faster closings. And if one of those tricks also saves you time, effort, and money, it is worth looking at.
We, humans, are 90% visual. We are better at processing visual information. We choose, fall in love, and approve or disapprove based on what we see. And we tend to prefer richer images with color, shapes, light, and texture perception. Â
So if you get an empty, uninhabited house to sell, you have a problem to solve. The pictures of a barren home are less attractive than those of a lived-in and tastefully decorated home. As a result, your real estate marketing investment will likely get you fewer requests for visits. Â
One objective, two very different solutions
At that point, you can take two actions:
- Employ the services of Real Estate Stagers. These professionals will bring their decoration expertise with their real-life furniture, paintings, draperies, and all other elements that will make your home look and feel premium and worthy of a homebuyer’s attention. That sounds very attractive, but there are issues: time and cost. Heavy items will need transportation and placement, while workers drill holes to hang pictures. With today’s high wages, the price of staging services has increased significantly.
- Use Virtual Staging. You can achieve the same premium look with digitally-added furniture, tableware, flowers, pictures, and everything your home needs to look magnificent. In addition, you will have a wider choice of decorative styles as Stagers’ inventory will no longer constrain you. Your pictures on the internet, the ones that bring the people in, will feel natural. Everything happens online with no physical effort needed.Â
Our experience at your service
In our experience at WALKINTOUR®, virtual staging services help your listing’s Single Property Website get more visitors and more engagement than those that show empty rooms. The investment pays off well, even without factoring in the time not taken to supervise real-life staging.Â
As times change and selling becomes more complex, we strongly recommend that realtors know more about the exciting and cost-effective digital real estate marketing products we offer.Â