Staging Your Home to Sell: How to Do It
Home staging is quite popular with developers and real estate agents. However, you might think staging your home to sell is not worth your time or effort. The reality is that home staging for selling can get you up to 10% over your asking price and speed up the sale by three times.
Let’s talk about how home staging can benefit you if you’re trying to sell your property and how to do it well.
What Is Home Staging?
Essentially, home staging is a form of visual merchandising where you set up your property to appeal to the broadest spectrum of buyers. Whilst interior design focuses on creating a space that appeals to you and your aesthetics, staging is the process of highlighting the best features of your property in a neutral manner.
What do we mean by neutral?
The idea of home staging is to attract prospective buyers by letting them imagine themselves in that space. A neutral space design should not be “staging my home for a showing,” where the decor, furnishings, and details reflect your likes and choices, but rather a well-staged home that appeals to a broad audience.
Instead, it should be generic enough that most of the people coming for a viewing would like it. You want to provide a broad-stroke picture that encourages them to start filling in the details.
A neutral colour on all walls would look nice to everyone, and if the buyers are the type who like stark contrast on one of the walls, it will get them started on the process of imagining how they’d decorate the room.
If they start seeing themselves redecorating, you’re halfway to a sale, as this would make them more inclined to put in an offer. That’s the purpose of staging a house—to get the buyer in the mindset of enjoying the space.
Benefits of Staging a House to Sell
Often, when you’re selling your house, it’s with the intention of buying another one. As such, you want the sale to go through quickly, and, more importantly, at the asking price. Here’s how home staging helps you achieve both of these objectives:
Demonstrates the Potential of the Property
When selling your property, you want to highlight its best features. For example, if your living room has a large window that lets in natural light most of the day, you want potential buyers to see and appreciate that as part of making your home more inviting.
By staging your house, you can help the potential buyer notice those features. You could accentuate the brightness of the room, its spaciousness, or even its quirky arches or oak beams. If there’s an aspect of the property that might appeal to viewers, staging helps you bring it to their attention.
Creates Aspirational Value
When you sell a house, you’re selling a space. By styling and staging it, you can sell a lifestyle. Instead of showing people bare rooms, you can show them the vision of what the house could be.
If you do it well, your viewers will find themselves desiring that lifestyle. This, in turn, would increase the value of the property in their minds. Not only will they aspire to live in that space, but they’ll also be willing to pay a higher price for it.
Helps the Viewer Visualise Themselves in the Space
Most people aren’t great at creative visualisation. They get nervous with “blank canvases.” So, when you show them an empty room, they don’t know how it might look once it’s furnished and decorated, which is why a staged home is essential.
With home staging, you provide them with a half-complete picture. Once they have that starting point, they’ll start filling in the details themselves. As soon as you’ve got them thinking about how they would decorate the rooms, you’ve got them thinking about buying your property.
Of course, if you’ve already moved out, you might not want to buy new furniture just to sell the house. In that case, home staging furniture for hire could be a good alternative. By using high-quality furniture, furnishings, and accessories, you’d be able to show your buyers what the space could look like.
Makes the Property Stand Out
In a buyer’s market, you must make a great impression to stand out in the sea of properties for sale. Fortunately, most people don’t think about staging their homes when they’re trying to sell. By styling your home the right way, you can make a lasting first impression and give yourself that all-important competitive advantage, helping it sell faster.
Staging a Home for a Quick Sale
As professional home stagers, we’ve worked on several properties, which brings us to our top tips for staging your home for a quicker sale. Here’s what we focus on when working on properties for our clients:
Define the Purpose of Rooms
When you want the buyer to visualise living in your house, it helps if you can show them how the space could be used. If you have an open-plan kitchen and dining space, demarcate the areas. A usable attic space can be staged as a home office, and the small storage room next to the kitchen can become the laundry room.
Of course, if you’re advertising a two-bedroom house, the buyer should be able to see two bedrooms, even if they do plan to use one as the office.
Plan Your Furniture and Furnishings
If your sofa is too big, your large living room will seem small. The same goes for a large bed in a compact bedroom. When staging your home to sell, you want to make it look reasonably sized, so identify furniture that fits well in the area. This will make your rooms appear comfortable and spacious.
Similarly, dark and heavy curtains might detract from the brightness of the room. If natural light is one of your selling points, look for light-coloured or sheer curtains. Any dark corners can be a great place to put a stylish lamp.
Cater to All Senses
Home staging is more than just interior design; you’re creating a mood. Don’t be afraid of using soft music and scented candles to engage senses other than sight. Fragrant flowers and plants can add more than just a scent; they also make the room look fresh and welcoming.
Don’t forget that temperature also plays a role in making a space feel welcoming. You don’t want the house to be overly warm but it shouldn’t be uncomfortably cold either. The right temperature can help buyers feel more at ease and make your home look appealing.
Pay Attention to Your Walls and Flooring
We mentioned earlier that home staging for selling requires designing the spaces in a neutral way so that the house appeals to more people. Part of that is the colour of the walls and the flooring.
It’s best to keep the walls a neutral colour, ideally a light one. Most people find carpets difficult to maintain, so switching to different types of flooring can be beneficial.
Services for Staging Your Home to Sell
Whilst we’ve provided an overview of the home staging process, it can be much more intensive and involved. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed, especially if you’re also moving out at the same time.
If you’re looking for home staging services, we at BoxNine7 will be glad to help. You’ll get a personalised service where we consider your property’s location, the demographics you’re targeting and more. We also have an extensive range of carefully curated furniture and soft furnishings that you can rent out from us.
Our expert interior designers can make your house look its best. If you want to attract buyers who will be happy to pay what you want, discuss your home staging needs with us. We cater property staging services in London, Surrey and its surrounding.
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