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 for sale 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 attract the home buyer in general 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 the home as an objective and critical buyer so they can position it to the best of their ability by focusing on rule #2
two. Stay in Cosmetic – Only improve those things in the home that will contribute to the final result. Stagers keep the cosmetic so that it makes financial sense in the selling price of the house. By focusing on the most dramatic transformations at a low price, a professional home stager achieves equally dramatic results on the home resale. Home staging, in essence, is an investment in future home sales profits by the home seller 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. Successful home staging works with the personality of the house and not against it for the best results.
Four. Create warm inhabited spaces… Yet 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 that gives you a clue as to who lives there, that’s about as it should be for a house NOT for sale. . However, in order to create broad appeal for buyers, we must strip the home of personality and seller-specific quirks while adding warmth and style. There is a definite “fine line” between “living” and appearing sterile. Shoot 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 directed to the best part of the room and, on the contrary, downplay the negative aspects of the room. Walk into a room and take note of what you notice immediately… 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 one.
6. Cleanliness 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 that the buyer perceives and that rusty sink drain goes completely unnoticed by the seller who has lived there for ten years while the buyers are repelled. How do you combat this lack of objectivity from vendors 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 needs to 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 distracting outdated furniture rather than buying new. The sole purpose of each accessory should be to update or modernize the existing space, so given current trends, the accessory that is left out should be large and less.
9. Let there be light! – Brainstorm 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 brightness,” so make sure your rooms get plenty of natural light (trim plants and shrubs around windows) as well as artificial in the form of general, task, and accent lighting. Kitchens especially need to be sunny and bright, so use inexpensive lights under cabinets as well as pendant lights above your islands and bars. 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 illumination.
Rules 10, 11 and 12 explain in particular why using a professional home stager makes such a difference to the end result…successful staging is not easy, natural or automatic.
10 Remember you’re 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 true original calling. Most buyers can’t use their imaginations, so don’t mistake them 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 out, your room will feel slanted or unbalanced and drive shoppers away. Your professional home stager knows how to create balance in a room. Make sure every piece in the room is to scale with each other. Just 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 arranged like wall flowers. It’s inconvenient for anyone to have to walk through a conversation area to get to another room, so get traffic around the conversation by pulling on 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 can be a particularly fatal mistake that many real estate agents 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 environment… not good for those internet photos. The reason a real estate agent would do this is very solid… most people can’t pick color very well and use it to their advantage. If you’re not comfortable with this tricky ability, play it safe, but remember that painting is the easiest and least expensive way to drastically 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 connection points” – Well, you did it, point number 12 is like the icing on a cake (and what would a cake be like without icing?). Like any great seller, fight “buyer envy” when they view 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 only one, this is where we FEEL AT HOME.” There are simple ways to do this: place a tray on your main bed with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, place a blanket and soft pillow on your favorite chair, place plates, napkins, wine glasses and wine on a patio set Exterior. and stack fluffy towels on your bathroom counter, as well as several pillar candles on your bed.
I hope these 12 rules have helped you in your efforts to prepare your home for sale. It takes a little work but it’s a small investment for a much greater reward of selling your home faster and for more money. Good luck!