Here are some tips I’ve learned on staging or presenting a home to maximize the beautiful impression your home can make on a buyer.
If everyone who walks through your home has an amazing impression and doesn’t want to leave, there will be more demand for your home and it will tend to get more competition and higher bids.
Let’s be clear. Staging does not let you sell the home for unreasonable prices. If your home is worth $400,000, no level of staging would make it sell for $600,000.
But, staging does maximize the amount you can get by giving the best impression possible.
A little cleaning, work, and creativity, can pay back in thousands of dollars in profit, even if you spent some time and money to get it done.
The general principles I’ve learned are to do 3 main things.
- Show off the space – Make your home look as big as possible – this is usually achieved by removing unnecessary things and arranging furniture properly
- Keep the design simple – Simple and modern style is best for showing off a space. When you only have a few key decorations or pieces of furniture, the eyes pay more attention to them and they pop more. The same goes for color if you have the money.
- Make them feel comfortable – So comfortable that they don’t want to leave. I believe this is done in various ways, which I will explain below.
The following suggestions are what I believe will help achieve these things.
Showing Off the Space
1. Remove Clutter – Anything unnecessary. Boxes. Toys. Put it in the garage or in storage. The less clutter in the way, the more space the buyer can see in the home.
2. Remove any unnecessary furniture – here’s a visual example of what that can do.
Notice the book cases and TV were removed, because they’re not necessary to show off the space.
They did some more as well, but the point was to show what a little furniture and clutter removal can do.
3. Make sure there’s enough lighting – a dark room is a small uninviting room
4. Clean up the front and back yard – If your back or front yard is full of weeds, no one wants to go there. When the yard is not clean, it signals to buyers that the owners normally don’t take care of the home so everything we see was done recently. Unconsciously, they may think, “there may be hidden problems.”
5. Use Neutral or Bright Paint – If your home is in need of paint and you can afford it, I recommend painting it with fairly bright or neutral colors (like tan or off white).
This shade of paint is easy to match furniture with, and creates a general feeling of space and warmth. This is usually well worth the cost since you will get many more bids and higher ones if the buyer already loves the paint job and doesn’t have to spend money out of pocket themselves.
Keep the Design Simple
Here are my personal tips to keeping the design simple, visually striking, and beautiful to the eye.
- Minimize the number of colors or color schemes.
- Usually 2 or 3 different colors at most works well.
- One simple method is to have one major background color, and a few items that are another color so those items can pop.
- It can be pieces of furniture, a few pieces of art, or a wall in a different color.
The following pictures will help demonstrate the effect this type of design has when all put together.
Please keep in mind that these specific designs probably cost a lot of money to get done.
These pictures are only meant to show what it looks like when you apply the principles I mentioned, and give ideas for you to play with for color, space, and design.
You don’t need to spend $10,000+ to achieve a similar effect. There are things you can color coordinate from Wal-mart, or Ikea, or Bed Bath and Beyond. They don’t have to be expensive or look like they’re from the year 3000.
Make Them Feel Comfortable
I believe to help someone fall in love with a home, they should feel like they could move in immediately, or make them feel like they don’t want to leave because your house already feels like their home.
1. Make sure the home is clean and stays clean
I recommend you:
- Keep the trash can as empty as possible. No old food should be smelled or seen whatsoever.
- Make sure there’s no dishes in the sink
- Make sure the toilets are clean in case a buyer needs to use it.
- Make sure all the floors are as clean as possible. Usually one professional clean before you start showings and regularly vacuuming or mopping/sweeping are ideal.
- Regular dusting is also encouraged
The main thing with cleaning is to make sure everything is visually appealing, clean to the touch, and free of weird odors.
2. Make sure the home also smells nice, not just free of bad odors.
Why? It’s not just enough to have no bad odors in a home. Having no bad odors is like having no broken windows. It’s the minimum. But it doesn’t set you apart from the other homes on the market or create a wonderful experience for the buyers.
I recommend in addition to making the home visually and spatially welcoming, you should also make it smell nice when your buyers visit the home. It doesn’t cost much but makes a world of difference!
Air Fresheners
Stand-alone air fresheners or plug-in air fresheners are the lowest maintenance and are more convenient than candles to me.
I personally prefer Renuzit’s Apple Cinnamon scent for home showings. It’s very pleasant and relaxing. Usually they’re about $1 each at Wal-mart or other stores. I also think vanilla or citrus smells good. But you can test around and see what works well for you.
Candles and Fragrance Oil Burners
Candles or fragrance oil burners work as well. I prefer the air fresheners because they’re low maintenance, work all the time, and have no fire. If you prefer using candles or oil burners, I recommend only lighting them before the buyers come over and putting them out before they arrive. We don’t want any accidents.
I really dislike automated air fresheners like these
^I hate these things. They make your house smell nice by regularly shooting out a blast a fragrance oil. To me, this is the same as someone spraying a can of Febreze every 5 to 10 minutes. It surprises and scares people. And sometimes it shoots them in the face or on their clothes with all of the fragrance spray.
I don’t like them. These automated spray monsters have scared me and they’ve scared my buyers. They do not help your showings. If you don’t have one, please don’t get it to sell your home. If you have one, please remove it if you want to make your guests feel comfortable in the home.
3. Make them feel like this could be (or is) their home
The last goal is to make sure the space is set up so that they can fill in the empty spaces with their own imagination.
You want them to:
- Fall in love with the home
- Get comfortable on the couch or just sitting on the floor
- Get lost in their daydream of living in that home
- Be able to easily forget that they’re in someone else’s home.
If you can make someone feel like they are already home and they can just relax, they’re much more likely to want to make that dream come true. They’re much more likely to put in an offer and be competitive.
How do we do this?
- We made sure the house was clean.
- We removed the clutter from the house.
- We designed it beautifully.
- We even used air fresheners!
What else can we possibly do to make them feel more at home?
Last tip for staging the home: Take down all the photos of family, friends, pets, etc.
Pretty much, remove all photos of actual humans from the decorations.
Why?
If your buyer is sitting on the couch daydreaming about living in this home, and they look up and see your family pictures, it makes it hard to imagine themselves as the owners of this home because someone else clearly already lives there.
So if you want them to be able to dream of living in this home, if you want to make their experience in your home magical, please make sure you don’t interrupt their dream by having your photos up in the house.
Instead, you can put up general art like this.
But ultimately, pack the personal photos away.
This will also make the pictures ready for you when you move to your next home, which will be soon. Because if you did all these things and didn’t overprice your home, it should sell very quickly.
I hope this article on my tips for staging a home was helpful to you!
If you have any comments, please feel free to let me know via e-mail or phone or text!
Please have a great day! 🙂