How to Stage a Home with Confidence 

Buyer Appeal is your Main Priority

Almost every home, condo or apartment can benefit from staging. The goal of home staging is to create a mood that buyers can emotionally respond to. Every house can look better with carefully placed plants, flower arrangements, updated lighting & appliances, less clutter, and less personalized statements and images. The potential buyer wants to walk into a house and see himself or herself – not the current family in a picture perfect frame in each room. No house is perfect – but staging works to help overcome any imperfections your house may have.

Catch the Buyers’ Attention with your Home Staging Efforts

Like anything else in this world, you have only a few second to catch someone’s attention. For an advertisement, it’s about 3 seconds, for most buyers it’s 7 seconds after stepping over your home’s threshold. Over 95% of buyers agents say that home staging has some effect on the buyers’ opinion of your home and 32% of buyers’ agents believe staged homes increase the dollar value buyers are willing to offer by one to five percent.

HGTV gives you 30 can’t miss home staging ideas to help your moving efforts.

Staging a home isn’t an option; it’s a requirement these days. With good staging, buyers will recognize how your home could be their new home. By following a few useful tips and tricks of the trade you can stage your home in an effective way that showcases the best assets of the house, impresses buyers and sells promptly. With bad staging, your home could be left languishing on the market for much longer than you’d like.

Keep Your Budget in Mind to Avoid Over-Staging

When staging your house, there are rooms that can yield more benefit than others. In addition to the ever-effective curb appeal updates such as mulch, new shrubs, and simple decorating tips, we have focused on the 3 most important rooms of the house: living room, master bedroom, and kitchen.

Houzz lends 21 staging tips to help you sell your home.

Did these tips help you learn how to stage a home? Go through your home and determine what is a high priority. These home staging tips should help you save money, make your home more appealing to prospective buyers and help it sell more quickly and at a potentially higher price than an empty, white-walled or over-cluttered house.

How to Stage a Home Infographic:

Take a look at this infographic that sums up all you need to consider when staging your home. It’s perfect to pin to Pinterest and to keep referring back to.

For more home staging tips and moving tips look to these categories on Stagetecture.

Home Staging Tips: How to De-Personalize your Home

Here are three steps to de-personalize your home:

1. Remove all personal effects

The very first step to de-personalizing your home is to remove all personal effects like photographs, framed wall art and knick knacks that you may have used to decorate your home. Give your prospective buyers a blank canvas so they can see themselves living in the house. If there is anything in the house that you will take away to your new home, like a vintage chandelier, remove it before the scheduled house inspection.

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 2. Refresh the house with paint

A coat of paint on your exterior home and interiors will give your house a fresh, new appeal. There is nothing that refreshes the interiors like paint. It is a cheap and quick solution. Neutral colors are your safest bet when re-painting. Remember that your favorite radiant orchid paint color might not fancy the prospective buyer. Paint the kid’s room in bright colors.

 3. Clear out the storage

Storage in the new house will of great importance to most prospective buyers. Expect them to look into drawers and open your closets. Remove all your personal belongings from the storage area. If you are still living in the house, consider packing them into boxes and placing them in the garage or hire a small storage space. Anything left in the closets and drawers should be placed neatly.

Give your house a welcoming feel. Make the house visually appealing but the décor should not reflect your personal taste. The potential homeowners should be able to visualize themselves in the house and should not feel as if they are intruding on your personal space.

For more home staging tips on Stagetecture, click here. You can also visit About.com Home Staging for more tips.

Staging Mistakes That Instantly Turn Off Home Buyers

Image via: Homeunik

Not Cleaning the Interior Thoroughly

If you want to turn off potential buyers show them a filthy house. While cleaning is the first rule of home staging, it is one some sellers ignore. Clean, clean, and clean some more. Make sure that your house is in the best condition – replace the carpeting, scrub floors, and stem-clean tile and grout. If the carpet smells, have it shampooed. If it is old and worn out, get rid of it. It is better to show bare floors than worn-out carpeting. Your home should not only be clean, it should be as neat as a pin.

Not Removing Personal Items

When staging your home, keep in mind that you are staging for buyers and not yourself. Buyers don’t want to know where you went for vacation last year or if you love politics. Remove all personal items from your home and store them in a rental storage facility. When your home is filled with personal items, buyers won’t be able to visualize themselves in the space.

Image via: Immotion Home Staging

Bad Odors

Seasoned realtors say that buyers buy homes with their noses. Your home should smell fresh and inviting. Odors are a big no-no, particularly kitchen odors. Avoid cooking pungent food for as long as your home is on the market. Also get rid of pet smells because buyers are bound to notice them. Remember that even if you are a dog person, not everyone is.

Image via: triovalspeedway

As you stage your home, bear in mind that buyers who come to see it will not look at it the way you do. What may be beautiful to you may be downright ugly to them. With today’s stiff competition and market challenges, you cannot afford to take any chances. Avoid these staging mistakes to gain a competitive edge over other home sellers.

If you’re trying to sell your home, look to Stagetecture’s Home Staging Tips at About.com too!

Home Staging Tricks: Ensuring your Kitchen has Buyer Appeal

Image via: Lime Design Bend

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Kitchen Staging: Give it a Cleaning Treatment

To save your bank, you have to invest physical labor to your kitchen staging. The first and foremost job that needs to be done is the cleaning. Clean it thoroughly so that it sparkles brightly. Empty all the horizontal surfaces in the kitchen and get rid of clutter like receipts, notes, keys, and things like that. Sweep and mop the floor, brush the baseboards, and vacuum the corners. Dust ceiling fans (if any), polish chrome fixtures, wash the stoves, and replace burnt-out light bulbs. Wipe down all the cabinets, polish the hardware like handles and knobs, and even consider replacement if anyone is worn out. Lastly, remove all cleaning products and sponges from the sink counter.

Stage your kitchen with organization

After cleaning everything, organize the place. Organize everything in the cabinet and stack up the dishes and plates there in a neat manner. Organize the cleaning supplies under the sink. Remember not to leave dirty dishes in the sink or in the dishwasher. Most of the buyers have a leaning to check the dishwashers. Keep the counter completely clutter-free except one or two decorative items or a cookbook. At last, take the trash outside.

Image via: HGTV

Give the Buyers a Sweet-Scented Welcome

The possibility of selling the home will be reduced 50% if a strong odor welcomes the buyer the moment s/he walks into the kitchen. So, consider dining out the night before and the day of an open house if you typically cook meals that leave a lasting odor. To treat the buyers with a sweet smell, bake a mint cake, burn a few sweet-scented candles, or place a pot full of fresh flowers on the counters.

Make your Kitchen Look Spacious

If your kitchen is small, you should apply a few tricks to make it look spacious because the vision of cooking and taking foods in a cramped place is not a very pleasant one. Replace the bulky chairs and large table with something slicker. Lighten up the place by making ways for natural light to get in and installing one or two lighting fixtures if necessary.

Image via: The Kid Collective

Finally give finishing touches to the place by making some minor tweaks like placing a rug under the table, arranging plants on the counter and windowsills, putting ceramic figurines and books in the bookcase, and hanging artwork on the walls. All these things will bring a homey feeling to the place.

Use these kitchen staging tricks to help selling your home faster.

It is not easy to convince today’s buyers. The tricks of scented candles, clean sideways, or sparkling windows can help but additional home buyer tips can always help to sell your home these days. Check out these home staging tips that are likely to make your home visible, shining over the others in the neighborhood.

Home Staging Tips: Making your Home Visible to Potential Buyers

Image via: Architects Corner

Remember to take Good Photographs

A great number of prospective homebuyers search for houses in the Internet. As first impression is the best impression, your house has to be look very impressive and nice in the photos you have put in the listings. Blurred, dark photos will certainly create a negative impression. So, employ a professional photographer to take attractive photos of your lovely home and put them on the listings.

Image via: Pinterest

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Home Staging Tips: Focus on the Curb Appeal

An effective way to make your home stand out in the neighborhood is to increase its curb appeal. Cleaning the outside of your home will make the half job done. Sweep away cigarette butts, leaves, pebbles and clean out sand, dirt, and other debris. Check if there are any broken windowpanes or cracks in the sideways and driveways. If yes, repair them! Trim the grass in the lawn at every edge. The appeal will be greater if you plant bushes and trees at the corners outside home. During winter time, shoveling and salting the sidewalks will give the impression that the home has been taken care of. Paint the exterior if you do not mind the expense.

Image via: Houzz

Clean Everything in your Home

Cleaning can make your home more valuable. There is absolutely no point to believe that any buyer will buy your dirty house. If needed, hire a cleaning service to deep clean it. The areas around the hot-water heater, furnace, kitchen sink, and fireplace should be neat, clean, and spacious. Vacuum the floors, declutter the closets, clean the walls and ceilings, and if possible, paint. Make the interior look like an expensive, cozy hotel room – clean and clutter-free.

Take care of the Kitchen and Bathrooms

Messy and dirty kitchen and bathrooms can kill even the most beautiful home. The buyers are not going to be pleased in any way if they see soap bars at the sinks, dirty and unfolded towels on the towel racks, filthy toilet covers, or stained sinks. You can imagine yourself as a buyer and think how repulsive it is to see a food stained potholders near a new stove, messy cabinets, or a dirty dish rack in the kitchen. Your bathrooms should be shining like a glass and smelling like perfumes. Do the necessary repairs and cleaning and improve the lighting of the kitchen.

Image via: Houzz

Successful staging is the secret of selling home quickly. Hope these home staging tips will bring you the best outcome.

For more home staging tips on Stagetecture, click here.