It’s all about first impressions! Home staging simply helps your home look more attractive while highlighting some of its best features. If your home is on the market, your goal is to makes potential buyers feel like they could live there, and the finest way to do this is to neutralize the surroundings. Following these tips will help you sell your house sooner and possibly for more money. Remember most people want to move into their new home without having to make updates to it.
1. Curb Appeal
Stand back and view your home as if you were seeing it for the first time. This is the ‘first impression’ stage. Depending on the season you may want to have pots of colourful and attractive flowers to greet buyers; a clean and inviting door mat; new and shiny door handles and/or knockers; a freshly painted door. In the summer, water your grass and garden 30 minutes before an open house- this will make your lawn sparkle
2. De-clutter
Start your pre-pack as soon as possible. You need to decide what you are going to keep, give away, sell or throw away/recycle. Many clients will rent storage lockers or have pods delivered so they can start to clear out what is not going to make the house look good.
3. Clean
A clean home translates into ‘They must have really cared for their home.” Use environmentally friendly cleaners where you can, for hard cleaning areas tsp is a good product. Bathrooms and kitchens must be sparkling clean at the very least.
4. Depersonalize
We know you love your family photos and your personal treasures and for living they are perfect. For selling pack them up carefully so you can showcase them in your new home. For selling you want buyers to focus on the best features of your home and not your personal things or collections.
5. A neutral colour scheme is the way to go for selling.
Choose only 3 colours or less to paint your house for selling. If you have an open floor plan then paint the main floor all the same colour.
6. Highlight your home’s best architectural features
Place your furniture in each room so that you have very obvious focal points that show off the home’s best selling features. For example, if you have a beautiful fireplace than place the furniture in a parallel grouping so that the eye is drawn to the fireplace.
7. Decide on the function in each room
If you were using your guest bedroom as your den for living, for selling turn it back into a bedroom with bedroom furniture in it. If you do not have the right furniture for each room consider renting it. There are more and more rental furnishing companies opening up every day. If you don’t want to rent then borrow.
8. Lighting your home to its best advantage
Use as much natural light as possible. Spend money on new light fixtures in brushed nickel or stainless steel. There are many low-cost lighting stores to select from so no excuses for having dated light fixtures.
9. Window treatments that sell your home
The most popular on the market are the 2” faux woods in a white tone to go with your trim. Decorative side panels will do the trick if you need to add warmth and colour.
10. Flooring needs special attention and is a good investment for updating the look of your home
Tile or linoleum is great for entrance-ways, bathrooms, kitchens, laundry rooms; a good quality laminate or hardwood is perfect for living rooms and family rooms; bedrooms are attractive in a neutral carpet.
11. Use Mirrors to make smaller rooms look bigger.
12. Neatly arrange fresh flowers throughout your home.
Bring in another set of eyes to help you catch something you may have overlooked. By planning and budgeting you can get yourself to the “OPEN HOUSE READY” stage. Most prospective buyers have already checked you out through the MLS listings. Will they like what they see?
Happy Selling!
