How Brokers And Realtors Can Stage Real Estate Local Market Data

Brokers and agents all know about home staging, but have they ever thought about staging hyper-local real estate data?

Why not? Everybody knows transforming a house into a salable property with all its personal attributes, not all of them positive, is an important, necessary undertaking in the business.

Sure a home looks nice and comfy with photos of mom and dad and the kids on the mantel place or with those crazy paintings they purchased at the local art show hanging on the wall or the closet filled with tons of shoes and outdated clothes.

But when it comes to sales time, those items need to go right out the door. A buyer needs to see a property for what it really is—walls, floor space, yard, garage space, etc.

So the staging process is a must. Conduct a major declutter, turn up all the lights, pull up the shades and let the natural light in, replace the paintings with mirrors, install new kitchen appliances, cabinets and fixtures, put away the toys in the yard, pull up the weeds and replace them with colorful flowers.

Basically the basics in preparing a home for sale.

But as we all know, there is more to selling a house than the house itself. There is the other information involved in that property that is critically important to buyers.

For example, schools. Where are the schools? What is the student/teacher ratio? What are the demographics of the student population?

Speaking of demographics, what are the local demographics for the area? Incomes? Price index?

As for the neighborhood, what’s going on with market trends? Are homes increasing in price? Are they trending down? Are they flat?

Are homes selling? Is it a buyers’ market and a person knows they have some bargaining power? Or is it a sellers’ market and a buyer can see by market data they better move fast.

Real estate data today can be just as critical as the tile in the bathroom, the size of the master bedroom or the lighting in the kitchen.

How are you as a real estate professional staging this data?

Are you just telling stories about how sales are rising in the area? Or are you supporting that claim with hard data.

Or are you showing buyers local data on your website? Or letting them go to another site to find it (and possibly a competitor).

Are you telling them, yes, that middle school down the street is a good one?

Or are you showing them hyper-local data with a breakdown of all the schools in the area and critical information about those schools?

How about geo-spatial data? Are you telling buyers there is a great yoga studio over there or are you showing them a map that displays all the neighborhood amenities (such as coffee shops, restaurants and golf courses) in relation to the property they are reviewing?

In this digital age of 0s and 1s, data makes the world go-round. Consumers use data and information all the time to make decisions. They can search for an item online and find a wealth of information instantly—specifications, price comparison and reviews.

As a broker or agent, how well do you supply hyper-local real estate data to help them make the biggest financial decision they will ever make in their lifetime?

“Home staging” used to be a hot new trend in the biz. Now it’s old school.

“Data staging” is the next evolution in real estate marketing. And with real estate data providers such as Home Junction and today’s big data capabilities, it’s a whole lot easier than renovating a kitchen. Add a few lines of code to your website, and you literally have an encyclopedia of local data to offer.

Be sure you provide everything a homebuyer needs today. Yes, they will be impressed by a new coat of paint in the living room. They will also be impressed by a graph on Recent Homes Sales and other real estate data on your website. It’s all part of the staging process in 2017.