Staging Your Home: Preparing Your Property For Sale In A Buyer's Market

The first thing to keep in mind is the purpose of staging your home or luxury property. The ultimate goal is to give potential buyers a positive feeling about your house when they walk through it. This is accomplished by creating an atmosphere of warmth, cleanliness, brightness, and a bigger more spacious look. If visitors experience all these feelings inside your home, they will be much more likely to want to buy.

With this in mind, there are some easy ways to stage your home and make it stand out: Remove the Clutter: Since we are trying to accomplish a look of a large and spacious home, we need to remove everything that makes the house look cluttered. This is more than just getting rid of all the junk, it also means possibly getting rid of some of your favorite furniture and moving it to the garage or storage.

Remember, when you put your home on the market, you are no longer arranging the furniture for your own tastes and comfort. Instead, it should all be focused on attracting a buyer.

Brighten Up the Paint: A new paint job is one of the most affordable ways of staging a home. If you do the painting yourself, it only costs you for the paint, which may be just a few hundred dollars or a little more. When applying new paint to your house, pick brighter colors that will highlight the features of your best rooms. One way to accomplish a bigger look with your painting is to make two adjacent rooms the same color. This will make them look like one big space.

Make All the Minor Repairs You Can Afford: The last thing a buyer in this market wants to deal with is repairs. There are simply too many choices out there, so your home needs to be in as perfect a condition as possible. Do as many little repairs as possible, from repairing ceiling cracks to replacing burnt out light bulbs. Don't give buyers any reason to cross your home off their list.

Make Sure the Exterior is Perfect: Curb appeal is crucial to the home staging process. If the buyer hates the way the outside looks, they will not care that much what the inside looks like. Keep the lawn mowed, bushes trimmed, and the sidewalks cleared at a minimum. In addition, do any possible landscaping and add flowers and other plants to make the outside of the home attractive.

In addition to these basic steps, it is always a good idea to work with a home staging professional that can give you more detailed advice on what to do to make your house stand out. Today, many real estate agents have a professional stager on their team who can help you fix up your home. Try to work with one who does. This will keep your staging costs to a minimum.