Ready, Set, Show!
Just like online dating, your home has to wow a potential buyer in the first 3-7 seconds or they will swipe left and move on to the next property. We all know first impressions count, but now they must be made quicker than ever. The world is moving at a faster pace than it was 5 years ago, let alone 10, 15 or 20. You have 7 seconds to sell your home so you better make a good first impression!
Grace & Co. was an early adopter of home staging. In the 1990s, colleagues would comment that Gail Grace was lucky to have homeowners who kept their homes so tidy and decluttered. They wished their sellers were as organized as hers, because her listings showed better, attracted more attention, and sold faster. What they did not know was that she had a professional organizer consulting her clients on how to show their homes in their best light.
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Over the years home staging has evolved. It began as decluttering, grew into accenting a client’s home with more current pillows, accessories, or pieces of art, and in its present state, Grace & Co. is often re-decorating their clients’ entire home. Staged homes used to stand out, but now that it has become the norm, a house that has not been staged stands out—in a bad way.
Grace & Co. stage their listings with three distinctive goals in mind. The first is to ensure that they show the house to be as large as possible, so decluttering is always their initial focus. They often find themselves helping clients transition from a starter house to a forever home (like the gorgeous home at 41 Scarborough Rd featured on page 30). The current home has usually seen a few additions to the family and with little ones comes stuff—a lot of stuff. If they want the house to move, that stuff has to move too.
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Secondly, the staging team at Grace & Co. wants to maximize the functionality of every inch of a home—especially now that remote work and virtual learning has put additional pressure on what we require from our homes. A recent Grace & Co. property was a smaller three-bedroom detached home that had been previously listed by another Realtor. The sellers had an infant who resided in the second-largest bedroom while the smallest bedroom was a home office. The team staged the middle bedroom with a double bed, showing that it would serve a child until they left home, and moved the little one to the back bedroom—a room that when presented as an office could be seen as being too small to be a bedroom. Then, an unused portion of the finished basement was set up as a home office. Only a few weeks after switching agencies, Grace & Co. had buyers bidding on the house and the sellers were ecstatic.
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Thirdly, Grace & Co. has always recognized that buyers aren’t just buying a home—they are buying a lifestyle. Beyond making a home feel larger and maximizing the efficiency of the space, current designer furniture, art, and accessories are a vital piece of the puzzle. Their inventory is curated to ensure a relevant look that helps elevate your home to the next level—custom ordered straight from the same manufacturers and suppliers that boutique home design shops buy from.
Grace & Co. understands that each home, and each seller, is different. Taking the time to sit with each homeowner to determine what their individual goals are is very important. Sometimes staging a home can be too overwhelming for a client and that is okay. Sometimes a home already looks like it is straight out of your favourite Instagram designer’s feed, so it does not require any staging. Grace & Co. creates a custom-tailored staging plan for each home, to ensure an efficient and maximized sale.