Staging Your Home with Flair

Selling your home is a serious process. Usually, a lot depends on a profitable outcome. Whether you are downsizing or counting on the equity from the deal to fund a business, the margin of profit can be extremely important. For this reason, successfully staging your home is a pivotal part of your selling strategy. Naturally, this job might make you feel anxious about your ability to complete it. However, by following these simple steps from Reynolds, you can do a great job of affordably staging your home. 

Do Some Research

Whether you have a definite plan, or you don’t have a clue, it is advisable to begin with a little spying on your competition. You can browse local listings of homes that are like yours, making some notes about what you see. By doing this, you can get an idea of the price ranges (homes in Manahawkin have been fetching a median price of $415,000), trends and insights on how the homes are being staged. With the same mission in mind, it would be wise to visit a few open houses and notice how the competition deals with decluttering, depersonalizing and staging.

The Role of Decluttering

You wouldn’t want to watch a beautiful sunset through a clouded lens. The same can be said about buyers trying to properly view your home with clutter all around. It distorts the esthetic impression of your home. 

You may be wondering how to identify clutter. Essentially, clutter is any item that is not important in the space it occupies. Once you’ve identified clutter, start the process of decluttering your home for proper buyer viewing.

Initially, it is best to start by composing a written plan. Within the plan, you should work out a realistic, time-sensitive schedule that begins with the biggest rooms. Also, you should label boxes to sell, keep, donate or throw away. 

Depersonalizing Will Help Set the Stage

Along with removing all messy items, you should begin the process of depersonalizing your home. This allows your home to become neutral enough to let buyers properly explore their own concepts. With this in mind, you should remove all collectibles, memorabilia and custom decorative items. This includes things like hunting trophies, toys, family photos, fishing gear, awards, souvenirs, and sports equipment. 

Also, depersonalizing extends to removing personal items from bathrooms and bedrooms. Unique color schemes and decorative items should be removed. For example, a busy wallpaper design may distract from the buyer’s own vision for the space.  

The Actual Staging Process

Like staging for a play, your goal should be to create settings that suggest how a buyer could use the space. As an example, you can use a desk, chair, and a few other items to stage a formerly unused room as a study. Likewise, you can stage the dining room as a key socializing area by arranging the furniture in a way that makes it easier for group communication. You can hire a professional stager to stage your home, but this will usually cost between $1,000 and $3,000. 

Throughout your home, it is important to use neutral colors. This allows the buyers to interject their own color ideas for the areas. Additionally, colors of the same hue can make two adjoining rooms appear like one big area. As an added touch, Home Staging of Houston recommends opening the curtains and turning on lights to brighten rooms as much as possible.

Don't forget the home's exterior! It's crucial to make the outside of your home look inviting to buyers in order to give a great first impression. By adding beautiful flowers and enlisting the help of a landscaping and/or hardscaping service -- all of which Reynolds provides -- you can create a wonderfully attractive exterior that can quicken the sale of your home.

Your attentive efforts in staging your home should leave a positive impression on the buyers. Following these tips can make your staging project more rewarding and inexpensive. As a result, you set yourself up for home sale success.