Introduction

Staging your home is important if you want to sell it quickly and for the best price. Staging makes a house look larger, cleaner, and more appealing to buyers.

Why Stage Your Home?

Staging a home is the process of making it look more attractive to potential buyers. Experienced real estate professionals recommend staging your house because it will help you sell your home faster and for more money than if you didn’t stage.

Here are five reasons why our experts say staging is effective and so important:

1. It allows you to show off the best features of your home and diminish the visibility of any undesirable features.
2. The home will look more spacious, warm, and inviting.
3. The furniture, artwork, and accent pieces are color-coordinated and will make the home visually pleasing.
4. Personal items are removed which makes it easier for a potential buyer to visualize themselves living in the home.
5. Furniture and decorations are strategically selected for the space which allows the rooms and spaces to flow together.

Professionally stagers are excellent at creating pleasant emotions and feelings that make potential buyers desire to live in the home.

Consider Hiring a Professional Stager

If you’re not quite sure where to start or feel overwhelmed, hiring a professional stager can help you get started and provide a detailed list of what needs to be done. They can also provide valuable insight into the process and reasoning behind what they do. An experienced stager will also suggest what items in the home need to be repaired. This can include painting, landscaping, lighting, or getting the drafty windows repaired!

Staging Your Home to Attract Buyers Starts With Packing

When it comes to selling your home, staging can make all the difference but staging is not just strategically placing furniture and decorations. It is also the process of preparing your home for sale by removing unnecessary items from closets, drawers, and cabinets. Remember, you are moving so start packing now. You want to pack everything that you will not need for the next 8 to 12 weeks. Your effort will be paid back handsomely with a higher sales price, fewer showings, plus reduced stress when it is time to move to your new home.

Remove All Unnecessary Items from the Countertops

Kitchens and bathrooms will look bigger when the countertops have very little if anything on them.  Remember, you want your home to look like the model home in the beautiful new community down the street. This means you need to:

● Remove and pack all of your personal items such as photographs, mementos, and other knickknacks.
● Pack your hair gels, facial creams, curlers, and all other personal hygiene items that you will not need for the next 8 weeks. What remains should be placed in a basket and put the basket under the sink.
● Remove all items from the kitchen countertop like the toaster, blender, mixer, and can opener. Pack everything you can live without while the home is being sold. The rest of the kitchen items should be placed inside the cabinets
● After everything is removed, place a few select decorative items on the countertops such as a flower vase or small decorative art piece.
● While you are at it, clean out your kitchen and bathroom junk drawers and any other drawers that are full of miscellaneous items that you don’t need.

If there are items you know you’ll never use again (like an old toaster oven), consider donating them instead of storing them in your home indefinitely.  Don’t pack and move something you will never use.

Remove All Evidence of Your Pets

You want your home to be appealing to as many potential buyers as possible and not everyone is a pet lover like us. So part of the staging process is to make the home desirable to non-pet lovers. To do that, you will need to remove any evidence of your pets. This includes removing leashes, collars, toys, playhouses, scratching poles, and outfits. Before your first showing, you need to have a plan to temporarily remove the pets, their beds, dishes, water bottles, and crates. See if a family member or close friend will help temporarily house your pets while the home is being toured. Finally, make sure you clean up any pet droppings in the yard and evidence that a pet lives there.

Yes, this will take some effort and may seem over the top, but by doing these things you will sell the home quicker and thus ultimately cause the least amount of disruption to you and your pets.

Make Sure Your Home is Light, Bright, and Clean

One of the most effective staging techniques, and the cheapest, is to ensure your home is light, bright, and clean. Clutter and darkness will make your home less desirable and might distract a buyer from seeing the good parts of your home. Clutter can also make the space look smaller than it really is, which isn’t appealing to buyers who want as much living space as possible in their new home. And finally, clutter and dark areas can make a house look dirty or messy, which will turn off potential buyers!

So open those window blinds and curtains, make sure all lights work, add extra lighting where needed, and clean until the home squeaks.

It’s Time to Get Creative!

Once you’ve completed the necessary prep work, it’s time to get creative! Here are some ideas for adding color and personality to your home:

● Change the lighting. A new lamp or fixture can make a big difference in how beautiful a room looks, and it won’t cost much money either. Remember, make the home light and bright and it will sell quickly!
● Add some tasteful but neutral artwork or paintings. Thinks of soothing paintings of a sun-filled flowering meadow or beautiful forest when the leaves are in the midst of changing colors. These can be inexpensive reproductions or prints that are readily available online and in home decorating stores.
● You might also consider placing some decorative throw pillows on furniture and some upgraded covers for the beds. Select items that are color-coordinated and that add warmth to the room.
● A few decorative towels, area rugs, and a new shower curtain in the bathrooms can spruce it up at a minimal cost

Stage the Furniture and Accessories

One of the most effective ways to make a house look bigger and more inviting is to strategically stage the furniture and accessories in the home. A professional stager’s mantra is “less is more” especially when it comes to the furniture inside a home. The goal is to make the rooms appear larger, open, inviting, and flow with the rest of the house. To achieve this you will need to:

● Move or remove furniture to create a more open space. If you have large, heavy pieces of furniture that take up a lot of space that aren’t necessary for daily living, consider moving them out to the garage or into a storage space.
● Use plants, decorative rugs, and pillows to add interest to the room and make them look more inviting.
● Remove anything that darkens a room or that blocks natural light. Again, light, bright, and clean sells.
● Use mirrors strategically so a room appears larger than its actual size. This works especially well when trying to sell a smaller house as it reflects light, adds dimension, and can make a house appear much larger than it actually is.

Just remember less is more, so don’t over do it!

Update the Colors in the Room

There’s a reason why neutral colors are popular. They’re easy on the eyes, go with anything, and will blend with almost any type or color of furnishings. If you have an area where the flooring or walls are a very distinct or strong color, then consider replacing the flooring and repainting the area with inviting shades of gray, beige, or off-white colors. It is better to use a throw, accent pillow, or decorative item to add a splash of color, and the color on the walls and floors be a soothing neutral tone.

Stage the Home for the Buyers Eyes and Nose

Experts know that staging is not only for the eyes but also for the nose.  For better or worse, our sense of smell creates the most vivid memories and can quickly trigger our emotions. You will always remember the smell of fresh bread baking or the scent of a cigar or skunk. When selling a home you want the scent of your home to trigger pleasant homey memories.

So the final part of staging your home is to air it out by opening the windows, changing the furnace filters, and cleaning the floors with a fresh scented cleaner. If you have pets and pet odors, this is especially important!

You can also use a fragrance diffuser to add some nice smells to your home but don’t overdo it. A potential buyer that comes into your home should get a mild passing whiff of a pleasant scent, not choke on the fumes of a scented spray. Overdoing it will make a buyer suspicious and ponder what smell you are trying to cover up.

The Bottom Line

What does every home seller want? They want to sell their home quickly and for a great price. You can achieve this by putting in the effort to properly stage your home. Yes, it can be a lot of work but real estate professionals will tell you that the return on investment is significant and worth the effort. We wish you great success with the sale of your home!