12 Rules of the Home Staging Road – Or How to Sell Your House RIGHT NOW
So how can you quickly and easily prepare a home to sell without breaking the bank? There are 12 rules to follow…
1. Remember the Masses – Rule #1 and #2, I consider the Golden Rules of home staging because this is what separates “home staging” from interior decoration. Interior decorating takes into account the personal tastes, personality, and preferences of the home owner, while “home staging” focuses on creating a valuable marketing product to appeal to the home buyer. in general that you are trying to visualize yourself in the house. Unlike the home seller who is emotionally invested in the home, a professional Home Stager is trained to see that the home is an objective and critical buyer so they can position it to the best of their ability by focusing on rule #2
2. Stay in the Cosmetic – Only improve those things in the home that will contribute to the final result. Stagers keep the cosmetic to make financial sense in the sale price of the home. By focusing on the most dramatic transformations on the cheap, a professional home stager gets equally dramatic results in reselling the home. Home staging, in essence, is an investment in future home sales profits by the seller of the home and sometimes even the real estate agent involved.
3. Consider the integrity of the home when preparing it for sale – In other words, it is what it is, what it is. Don’t try to turn a Tuscan-style home into a craftsman…it just won’t sit well with buyers or anyone else. A successful home staging works with the personality of the house and not against it to obtain the best results.
4. Create warm inhabited spaces… However, no one lives there – When you walk into a house, you can usually tell exactly what age, style, and personality lives there. If there are baby toys in the family room, a dog bed in the corner, and a dozen family photos on the mantel giving you a clue as to who lives there, which is as it should be for a house that is NOT for sale. . However, in order to create great buyer appeal, we must strip the home of the seller’s specific personality and quirks while at the same time giving it warmth and style. There is a definite “fine line” between “living” and appearing barren. Shoot for the look of a model home, and if you don’t know what it looks like, visit a few in your area.
5. Find the focal point and make it fabulous! – The foundation of any good design lies in finding the focal point of a room and making sure it really shines. The focal point is the first place someone looks when they walk into a room. In the sense of home staging, we want to make sure that the eyes are drawn to the best part of the room and instead downplay the negative aspects of the room. Walk into a room and take note of what you immediately notice… is it positive or negative? Remember, buyers are looking for a reason NOT to buy the house…make sure those focal points don’t give them any.
6. Cleaning is essential! – This really goes without saying, but unfortunately it needs to be said and emphasized because many times home sellers cannot objectively clean their own home. Their noses have adapted to the strange smells the buyer picks up, and that rusty sink drain goes completely unnoticed by the seller who has lived there for ten years while the buyers are repulsed. How do you combat this lack of objectivity of sellers without offending them? Quick Tip: Cleaning windows, walls, and reflective surfaces helps add light and space to a room. I’m dating myself when I say, “be a Felix, not an Oscar.”
7. Create the illusion of space – This is a standard maxim of home staging. He claims that by removing extraneous furniture he can create the illusion of space within a room. Everything in a room must earn its place, so it’s generally safe to say that 50% of what’s in a room can now be put away to effectively organize the room and create space WITHOUT stripping it of its personality.
8. “Up Down” to Update – Generally, the best thing a home seller can do to update their home is to remove purchases that are more than 10 years old. I call this “updown” to update. Ditch the old floral prints, old pink curtains, and brass chandeliers. It’s usually cheaper and easier to remove or camouflage that distracting outdated furniture than to buy new. The sole purpose of each fixture should be to update or modernize the existing space, so given current trends, the fixture being shelved should be big and less.
9. Let there be light! – Brainstorm about lighting of all kinds within each room. Every time you show a house, make sure all the lights are on in the house… no exceptions. Buyers respond to “light and bright,” so make sure your rooms have plenty of natural light (trim plants and shrubs around windows) as well as artificial light in the form of general, task, and accent lighting. Kitchens especially need to be sunny and bright, so use inexpensive under-cabinet lighting, as well as pendant lights over your islands and counters. Make sure every corner of your rooms is well lit by using simple lights behind trees and tables. Use candles liberally as an emotional connection as well as a form of lighting.
Rules 10, 11 and 12 explain in particular why the use of a professional home stager makes a big difference in the final result… successful staging is not easy, natural or automatic.
10 Remember you are calling, balance like a rowboat, climb like a saucer and be a traffic cop – Make sure each room has a clear purpose by remembering its original true calling. Most buyers can’t use their imagination, so don’t mistake these for an office dining room or a pool table in the front living room. Balance your rooms by evenly placing each piece on the sides of the room (like a rowboat). If you have a large entertainment center in one corner with nothing in the opposite corner to balance it, your room will feel lopsided or unbalanced and drive away buyers. Your professional home stager knows how to create balance in a room. Make sure each piece in the room is to scale with each other. Like a properly balanced meal, don’t have a giant sofa with a small coffee table… it doesn’t work. A home stager borrows from other rooms to scale each one effectively. Finally, organize traffic and flow in a room by making sure your furniture isn’t positioned like wall flowers. It’s awkward for anyone to have to walk through a conversation area to get to another room, so have traffic go around the conversation by pulling your furniture. Believe it or not, it makes the room appear larger instead of smaller as many believe.
eleven Color is always king and beige is boring – I think we’ve all made some color mistakes in the past, but Rule #11 may be a particularly fatal mistake that many realtors will make when trying to play it safe with home sellers by telling them to paint the house. house of a neutral color. What you get is a bunch of black holes (furniture) in a white or vanilla setting…not good for those internet pics. The reason a real estate agent would do this is very strong… most people can’t pick color very well and use it to their advantage. If you’re not comfortable with this tricky skill, play it safe, but remember that painting is the easiest and least expensive way to dramatically improve interiors. At the very least, have an experienced professional home stager give you a simple consultation and suggest colors. Decorators and Stagers will have the tools and rules to know when to play it safe and when to use color to highlight or de-emphasize a particular feature.
12 Create “emotional hotspots” – Well, you did it, point number 12 is like frosting on a cake (and what would a cake look like without frosting?). Like any great seller, fight for “buyer envy” when they see your home by creating spots in each room that emotionally speak to buyers about a lifestyle they can aspire to. This subconscious conversation gives buyers fuel for their imaginations and multiple reasons to buy this “emotionally” staged home. You want a buyer to walk into a house and say: “this is it, this is the one, this is where we FEEL HOME”. There are simple ways to do this: place a tray on your master bed with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, place a blanket and soft pillow on your favorite chair, place plates, napkins, wine and wine glasses on a patio set abroad. and stack fluffy towels on your bathroom counter, as well as several pillars of candles on the bed.
I hope these 12 rules have helped you in your efforts to prepare your home to sell. It takes a little work but it is a small investment with a much bigger reward of selling your house fast and for more money. Good luck!