If you’re about to put your home on the market, understand that you are about to engage in a war of sorts. Selling your home is a battle with other listings for the qualified buyers that are out there, a battle with everything else a buyer has to do for their time and attention and a battle with every other thing they could be spending their money on. A well-priced, impeccably-staged home is the A-number-one weapon you must wield to win this war.
So, it’s time to buck up, put your emotional sensitivities aside and get hard core about home staging – here are 7 tactics for your battle plan.
1. Conduct a recon mission to scope out the competition. As soon as you start thinking about selling, you should be visiting the other homes in your competitive bracket – the other homes that your home’s likely buyer will also likely see – during their Open Houses. Attend the Open Houses of listings with similar beds, baths, square feet and price range to your own home, both in your neighborhood and in similar neighborhoods in your town. You’ll start to see what homes look like that sell quickly and at (or above) the asking price, and what homes look like that lag on the market.
2. Create your plan of attack. To win this home-selling war, you must attend to the basics of home staging systematically, creating a comprehensive, written plan for everything from your home’s landscaping, the exterior and interior finish materials (paint, carpets, etc.) and every individual room of your home, including what you’ll do with your personal property and what furniture and decorative items will be used to stage the place.
3. Deploy the stealth tactic of demolition. Turns out, some of the most powerful staging techniques are simply removing, demolishing and otherwise getting rid of unsightly features, versus adding or strategically enhancing them. This is especially critical to keep in mind if you are staging your home on a shoestring budget – rather than trying to figure out how you’ll come up with the cash to buy a bunch of new things, focus first on whether there’s anything you can remove that will enhance a buyer’s experience of your home.
4. Pre-pack. The call to de-clutter is the rallying cry of virtually every stager. By that, they mean to clear countertops, floors, table-tops and every other surface in the home of as much of the minutae of living as humanly possible. All that should remain is the occasional decorative or functional piece – a clock here, a vase of flowers there – and even these things only to the extent that they jive with the staging plan.
5. Wash, rinse and repeat. The sort of cleaning you need to execute before you list your home is not like any cleaning you might ever have done before. The cleaning you give your home before showing it to buyers must be uber-thorough, covering every surface – even the nooks and crannies you’ve forgotten existed – and it must be from the outside in. The best-staged, best-selling homes tend to have garages, basements, side yards, sheds and dog runs that are just as immaculate as their kitchens, bathrooms and master bedrooms.
6. Fixate on trims and details. It’s tempting, when staging, to do the big jobs – painting the walls, polishing the floors, moving and removing furniture – and to run out of steam and cash before the little details get handled. One pattern you might note on your recon mission is that the homes that show as the most pristine, the most polished, are often the ones which were prepared with the most attention to detail.
On the outside of the house, this involves making sure details like mailboxes, window shutters, eaves and even shrubbery are meticulously painted, trimmed and even replaced. Adding attractive flowers, door kickplates and knockers and house numbers are some inexpensive ways to add visual detail and a polished, cared-for look to an otherwise plain property. Inside, window trims, door casings, moldings and baseboards have the same effect, as does ensuring that drawers and doors operate smoothly and that walls are scuff mark-free. In this way, some of the least expensive home staging projects can carry the most powerful buyer-impressing payload.
7. Be brutally honest with yourself. When you think you’re done preparing your home, think again. Ask yourself: What can you edit? What looks like clutter? What is distracting? What stops a buyer from seeing the possibilities for their own family here?
Read More at Trulia | Tara-Nicholle Nelson | Aug. 28, 2012, 11:56 AM
Renaissance Homes is an award winning Street of Dreams custom home builder specializing in green building, remodeling and renovations for the Portland market. Visit our Design Studio to personalize your next home.
Awarded the Portland Homebuilder’s Association 2011 “Builder of the Year.”
