Muscular Home Staging
Tips For Sellers .

If you’ve decided it’s time to move to a new house or perhaps your job or career has decided for you, that means you’ll be putting your house on the market. Of course, you’ll want to get top dollar for your home, and you’ll want it to sell as quickly as possible. Potential home buyers will be looking at several homes to consider, so to get them to see themselves in your home you’re going to have to do more than just run the vacuum and fluff the pillows. You have to do some home staging.

The vast majority of real estate agents agree that a good job of home staging enhances the chances of actually adding monetary value to your home as well as increasing the chances of a much quick sale. So, set your stage for your success with these home staging tips for sellers that we’ve put together for you.

Before You Home Stage The Interior Boost Curb Appeal

The old saying “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” holds true when it comes to home staging. So, before you shift your focus to all the interior home staging tips, don’t overlook your opportunity to improve your curb appeal. Many people even before making a decision to make an appointment to see your home will do a drive by first just to see if the home will pass the first look test. Make sure your home is enticing them to the make that showing appointment.

• Power wash your sidewalks and driveway
• Make sure your house numbers are in good repair
• Add some blooming plants or strategically place flowerpots
• Make sure your windows are squeaky clean
• Keep your lawn mowed and edged and re-seed or sod where needed
• If you have a front porch be sure to repaint, touch up, or re-stain as needed

Home staging your entryway is a great way to make your inviting. Little things like a clean doormat and a few fresh plants will go a long way. If you have room add a couple of nice chairs so potential buyers can see themselves sitting at their new home. Where possible, consider adding some solar lighting to your walkway. You never know… potential buyers may do their initial drive by in the evening time.

Home Staging The Outdoors

Before we enter the house for the inside home staging, let’s not forget about the outside in general. Make sure that all the lawn and plants are mowed and trimmed. Even if you have very little outside space or even a lawn, think about making your tiny outside charming like a secret garden and not just small.

Do Your Home Staging Where It Counts The Most

In the world of home staging, not all rooms carry the same weight from a potential buyer’s perspective. So, you want focus your efforts and up game in the rooms that really pull the most weight and attention. Not surprisingly these rooms are:

• The kitchen
• The living room
• The master suite

These are the rooms that you want to achieve the wow factor. Don’t spend as much time in the less influential rooms such as the secondary bedrooms and baths.

It’s Not About Your Stuff

The primary objective of staging your home is to get potential buys to “see” themselves living in your home. The best way to do this is to present a tastefully staged blank canvas to them. You don’t want them constantly seeing and talking about your stuff. It’s about the buyer. So, you want to depersonalize your home and present a home that has style and charm, not a home that still belongs to you. Remember your personal style doesn’t matter to a buyer, so reign it in.

• Remove personal photos from rooms and on the walls (including anything stuck on your fridge)
• Keep your clothes stored away and out of sight
• Remove any personal items that you normally keep on your bathroom counter
• Remove anything religious or political or attempts at humor

Depersonalizing your home is going to make it seem a bit odd to live in during the home staging phase of the selling process. It does, however, make it much easier for buyers to establish a connection to your home. Which will mean you won’t have to live in your staged home for as long before getting that offer.

Clutter Be Gone

Clutter uses up space. Space is what sells. So, clutter gets in the way of you selling your house. Getting rid of the clutter will make your home spaces look bigger and more inviting. You don’t have to get rid of your things forever… although you should take a hard look… but you should certainly be packing up seasonal items and getting them out of the house; and items you won’t be needing during your home staging process.

Potential buyers are going to be opening up your closets and checking out how much extra room and storage potential you have in your house. Less clutter means your house looks more spacious which equals more appealing to potential buyers.

Use Your Extra Rooms With Purpose

Have you been using a spare bedroom or bedrooms and just kind of “catch all” rooms? If so, it’s time to get them back into the game. Each room should have clarity of purpose. Would it make a nice office space? Should it be a guest room? How about a kid’s room? These answers will vary depending upon the home. But the key is to think like a potential buyer would think. Regardless, giving the room purpose by making it a real room and a part of the team will payoff.

Clean Your Home Like It’s An Olympic Event

The cleaning you’ll do for home staging purposes should go way beyond what you might normally do for your annual spring cleaning. Get after every square inch of your home between the baseboards and the ceilings. No buyer wants to walk through a home and get the feeling that the home has been lived in hard and not taken care of. This is a huge turn off. So, you want to make sure that every inch of your home shines like a new penny. So, if you’ve put off or neglected certain cleaning tasks, now is the time to shape them up.

Be Vary Aware Of Pet Odors

This can be a real deal killer. We all love our pets, and the potential buyer may even have their own. But we don’t want them lingering anywhere during the home staging process. Get your rugs and carpets professionally cleaned and sanitized. Ask some friends to stop by after you’ve cleaned and give your home the sniff test. And make sure you don’t have any of your pet’s favorite toys anywhere in sight when you have a showing.

Patching And Repairing

If you really get down to the brass tacks with your home staging cleaning initiative, you’ll probably run across spots that need to be touched up, patched, or repaired. Keep an eye out for these areas in your home that could you use a bit of TLC. Some touch paint, spackle, and caulk will go along way in showing the potential buyers that you have take pride and care of your home.

Neutralize The Colors

This home staging tip for sellers is a bit more time consuming and expensive. So, this will depend each individual case. But color choice can make a big impact on the ultimate selling price and the time your home spends of the market. Brightly painted walls may be your jam, but they are more often than not a big turn off for buyers. So, why limit your pool of potential buyers, you want to generate lots of interest and be a specialty property. A potential buyer may ultimately want to do brighter colors, and neutral colors give them the opportunity to do just that if they want.

Keep It Fresh

Don’t go overboard in your home staging by adding too many plants and flowers… this then just becomes clutter. But a few well-placed plants can give your home an air of freshness, color and a sense of life to your home.

The other side of fresh is odor and you want to make sure you don’t have any. Your deep cleaning that you did will probably take care of any odor problems, but you want to make sure you don’t have something in the trash brewing up an odor especially before a showing. And please don’t overdo any air freshener plugins and things like this. If your house is clean and you have a few plants, you should be just fine.

Light The Way

Dark is sad and depressing. Especially if it describes any of the rooms in your home. So, open up the blinds and let the light in. Lighting up a room will also make the room feel bigger… remember space is a biggie. When you have a showing, make sure you turn on all the lights in your house including your closets and lamps. This makes your house more welcoming and the buyers can focus on your beautifully staged home rather than looking for switches.

Rearrange For Visual Space & Walkability

You want your home to inviting and open with as much walkable space as possible. If you have extra furniture now is the time to get it into storage. If you have bulky oversized pieces, pieces that are damaged you should think about selling, donating, or getting rid of them. You want your rooms to a that spacious feel and you want buyers to be able to visualize where they’ll be putting their furniture. And besides, it may cost you more to move your bulky furniture to your new home that it is actually worth.

Most all of the home staging tips for sellers don’t require a big budget. It’s really about giving your home a balance between being completely staged but to look very charming and livable. Use your agent for home staging tips and ideas. Not only are they the professional, but they also hear all the comments and feedback that clients give them. So, they know what works as well as potential pitfalls and deal breakers. The goal for home staging for sellers should be to entice buyers to see the value of your home and to “see” themselves living there.