Taking Home Staging to the Next Level: Lifestyle Merchandising
Did you know that home staging is all about “lifestyle merchandising”? Yes, when you sell your home, you are actually marketing a lifestyle to potential buyers.
I recently graduated from an advanced staging course taught by Matthew Finlason, host of HGTV’s “The Stagers.” It was an intense two-day course attended by just a handful of home stagers from the New York City area.
These are the principles that were taught during the course:
• Casting a “wide net” with staging to attract the widest range of buyers is a thing of the past.
• Developing a “perfect lure” to attract the right buyer with a staging represents a paradigm shift.
• While it’s okay to neutralize a house from the personality of its occupants, don’t sterilize it.
• Home Staging is now known as Target Staging. The destination stage involves knowing who the specific buyer(s) might be and creating a design plan to attract that buyer(s).
• Before the stages of a home stager, it is important that you first know the demographics of the most likely potential buyer (age, income, gender, marital status, education, etc.).
• It is also important to focus on the buyer’s psychographics (the industry they are in, their leisure time activities and interests, their home style or aesthetic preferences, the profile of retailers in the area which will be an indicator of the profile of the residents,).
• This buyer’s dream home should be staged with colors, shapes, textures, objects and artwork that make them emotionally connect with the space. For example, if the buyer profile is a single male working on Wall Street, then the space should be arranged to reflect the lifestyle and interests of that buyer profile.
• It should be staged to “tell stories” according to the profile of the buyer. For example, if the potential buyer is a woman who works in the fashion district, set up a desk with fashion books and clothing sketches.
• The staging is “lifestyle merchandising” and “buyer calling.”
• One must organize to create a life that buyers can aspire to and relate to. Most people want to buy a home to enhance their lifestyle, so you need to create a lifestyle that these buyers want.
• One must stage so that the aesthetic of their company shines, but not all stage sets look like all other stage sets that one or other set designers do.
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