What if a Home You Stage Fails to Sell?

If you’re concerned about what will happen if a home you’ve staged does not to sell, and what liability you have in the situation, you’re not alone. Many aspiring home stagers, and even established ones, share the same fear.

The first thing to remember is the person the client will be upset with when their home isn’t selling is the real estate agent not the home stager.

Yes, you’re decorating the house to sell, but you’re not in control of:

• pricing the property correctly for the location it is in
• running ads
• hosting open houses
• booking showings
• marketing it to other real estate agents

These things are all the job of the real estate agent not the home stager.

A home stager packages a product for the real estate agent to sell, but after that, it’s up to them.

I never tell a client that if they spend a certain amount of money in staging that I guarantee their home will sell in x amount of time for tens of thousands of dollars more than without staging. That would be crazy and irresponsible for me to do because of the factors involved in how quickly a house will sell.

You can do an awesome staging job, but you have no idea what shape it’s in after you leave when people come for showings. Or, the listing agent might be ineffective in the way they’re trying to market the property. The sellers might be stuck on getting a certain price and impossible to negotiate with. There might be six offers but they’re all rejected.

I once staged a 4 bedroom home that by the time I was done looked great for what it was. But I couldn’t change the fact that the kitchen was 30 years out of date and it was located on a busy corner that would be dangerous for children. There was nothing I could do about the fact that it was a 1970s house on a street where everything else had been torn down and replaced with modern homes. I had repairs done, repainted in appealing colors, furnished it, added accessories, artwork and bedding. But, the inherent drawbacks of the location and age of the house, relative to its neighbors, needed to be factored into the asking price to create an appealing package for potential buyers.

Unfortunately, the homeowner thought because all the other houses on her street were selling for millions of dollars, hers should be priced $100,000 over what it was worth.

Guess what? It didn’t sell because no amount of staging could fix the fundamental problems with this overpriced home.

While home stagers are an important piece of the real estate puzzle by ensuring a house is decorated to appeal to potential buyers, we are still only one piece of a large puzzle.

I doubt that you would ever get the blame from a home owner if their home does not sell, but if that should happen, I hope this article will give you some confidence that the fault does not lie with you.

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. Gould has trained over 4000 home stagers around the world.