Why stage your home

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Get the latest top line research, news, and popular reports. When selling your home, the goal is to sell it fast and for the highest possible price. You can increase your chances for success if you stage your house before listing it. As a seller, you want to help people see themselves living in your home. One of the top strategies to achieve this is to de-personalize your home, as tough as this may be to do.

Decorating in a neutral way appeals to those hunting for their perfect home. You want buyers to be able to picture themselves living there — placing their furniture in the rooms, putting up family photos and having breakfast in your kitchen. The same goes for taste-specific decorating choices. Unusual paint colors and exotic knickknacks are fine when you are living in the home.

The majority of house hunters always begin their search online — some may be just looking, while others are serious about finding something with that wow factor. Staging your home before selling will make your home shine in comparison to others online. What Is Staging a Home?

If you have a tight budget and want some ideas on how to stage your home, book a consultation with a professional stager. For a few hundred dollars, the stager will perform a walk-through of the home, work with the agent to understand the local market, and then detail how each room is better staged. Do a deep clean. The last thing you want is for grimy baseboards and dirty bathrooms to detract from a beautiful staging job. You might want to hire a professional cleaning service to handle this step.

Do a smell test. This can be a deterrent to a prospective homebuyer walking in for the first time. Choose one or two key rooms. Staging an entire house can get expensive, especially if you end up renting furniture for a few months.

Instead, focus on a couple of key rooms, such as the living room and kitchen, so prospective buyers can get a sense of what it would be like to live there. Stage according to budget and lifestyle. Think about the general budget of prospective buyers and what their ideal living space would look like.

Keep it minimal. Instead, you want to provide the property with a certain aesthetic and general feel of hominess. Keep the number of items in each room to a minimum, and place them away from walls. Decorate the walls and shelves sparingly. If you do paint the walls , use light, simple colors to help open up the space. Benefits of Staging a Home Though it can be a bit pricey, having your home staged for sale is worth considering. There are a number of benefits to staging, including: Help your listing stand out online.

With so much competition, your home can easily get lost in the sea of listings across the web. Professionally staged homes are eye-catching and can encourage more buyers to consider your property, even before they see it in person. Make your home feel aspirational. You can help create that emotional connection between a buyer and your home by staging it. Professional color combinations, smart layouts and unexpected pieces help the buyer develop positive feelings about the space and imagine living in it.

Show ways to use extra rooms and funky floor plans. When a room is completely empty, it can be tough to envision how it might be used.

Staging can help buyers see the potential of a room and how to get the most value out of it. Plus, empty rooms can actually look smaller than they really are; staging can help them appear larger. Increase the selling price. Staging not only tends to help move properties faster, you could end up selling for higher than expected. Drawbacks of Staging While home staging might help you sell your house faster, it requires a significant upfront cost. Home staging requires an upfront investment that may or may not pay off, but it often does.

Focus on decluttering. A good decluttering session can go a long way toward selling your home faster. This can understandably be difficult to keep up when there are kids or pets in the house, so consider hiring a cleaning help temporarily.