Staging Your Home
Staging Your Home!
Staging a Home: Step by Step
(an excerpt from Loren Keim’s How to Sell Your Home in Any Market)
Most clients argue about whether or not to take the time, expense and effort to stage a home. What they fail to realize is that they may be leaving thousands of dollars on the table when they sell the property if it doesn’t appear in its best condition. Clients religiously watch “house flipping shows” on television and marvel at how some paint, carpeting, and repairs improves the value of the home, but refuse to work on their own home.
One of my relatives sells a lot of children’s clothing on eBay. Before selling the clothes, she cleans and presses them so they look new. She receives a better price and a faster sale on each item because of their appearance. If you are selling a home, and you take the time and effort to enhance the appeal of your home with staging techniques, you may not only sell your home faster, but also sell it for more money. Homes that appear larger, cleaner, and well cared for will appeal to a broader range of buyers, attracting more buyers, and the buyers will be less hesitant to spend more money to acquire the home.
While every real estate expert has their own set of steps for staging a property for sale, my time-tested method follows a five-step process.
1. Decluttering and Repair Stage
2. Enlarging Stage
3. Deep Cleaning Stage
4. Neutralizing Stage
5. Setting the Home Apart Stage
Step 1: Decluttering and Repair Stage
First is our decluttering and repair stage. Let’s face it, you have too much stuff in your house and it makes the home look small and unkempt. You don’t need all that stuff out on the counters, and the kids can put away some of their toys. During the decluttering stage, you should realize that you are planning a move. Try to get rid of anything that you don’t need or that is taking up space. Try to throw out or sell what you don’t need or don’t plan to move with you. If you still find that you have too much “stuff,” then rent a storage bin, pack up your extra belongings, and store them away from your house.
Repairs should be done to anything that you know is an issue in your home. You will have to provide the buyer with a seller’s property disclosure that outlines everything that is wrong with your home. Buyers will be concerned about any issues that remain unresolved. Keep in mind that with any potential repairs, the buyer will overestimate the cost to repair and then take off more than the overestimation for the trouble of having to do the repairs! Take a little time and do all the little things that you’ve been avoiding the last few years. Fix the drippy faucet, caulk the bathtub, and patch that hole in the drywall outside your son’s bedroom door.
Step 2: Enlarging Stage
The second phase we call the enlarging stage. Dark colors and an excess of furniture crammed into a room tend to make a house appear smaller than it actually is. Buyers don’t feel they can fit their furniture in the space or they feel cramped when they walk through. National Home Builders are masters of displaying space in homes. They will put very limited amounts of small furniture in rooms, paint all the walls off-white, and use mirrors to successfully give the illusion of more space than is actually there. You can use the same techniques fairly easy by painting your rooms an off-white color, removing extra, unnecessary furniture, and replacing some of your pictures on the wall with a mirror or two instead.
Step 3: Deep Cleaning Stage
The third stage of enhancing the appeal of your home is to perform a deep cleaningof the home. You will not only make the house appear more attractive, you will eliminate people’s fear that the home was not well maintained. One of our best tips is to wash all the dust off the furnace. Even a furnace that i’s only a year old appears older because of the dust settling on it. You can eliminate worry by simply cleaning it off. You may be competing against newer homes that appear fresh and shiny. Clean the fingerprints off the light switch plates, dust off the molding on the walls, and make sure to spray any mildew in the basement.
Step 4: Neutralizing Stage
Stage four is neutralizing. You may not believe this, but some people actually select one home over another because one home has carpeting that goes better with their furniture. You don’t need to run out and replace all the carpeting in your house, but you should try to neutralize your home as much as possible. Off-white or light colored walls appear brighter, make a room look larger, and fit with most buyer’s furniture and decorations.
Step 5: Setting Your Home Apart Stage
The last stage is Setting Your Home Apart. Add warmth and character to your home. This will help your buyers to discover an emotional connection to the home. Lighting a fire in the fireplace, burning lightly scented candles, and setting up a nice chess set on the coffee table are all staging techniques to set your home apart. You are giving the buyer a picture in his or her mind of how he or she might want to use your home. They can better imagine friends and relatives visiting and sitting around the fireplace.
If you’d like an opinion of how your home might be staged in order to attract top dollar, call our team at the number above and we’ll be happy to help!
