METCALF MOVING BLOG
How to Stage Your Home to Sell
If you’re excited by the prospect of moving and you want to do everything in your power to make your relocation happen, you may first have to get through step one: selling your existing home. But with today’s real estate market, is there such a thing as putting your home on the fast track to getting sold? There is, and one of the most critical steps to making that happen is learning how to stage your home.
What Is “Staging a Home?”
Staging a home is doing whatever it takes to make a home attractive and appealing to prospective buyers. This goes far beyond simply “tidying up” and making necessary repairs, and includes some practices that you may not have even thought of.
The Key to a Successful Home Staging
If there’s anything that has to be accomplished in order to make your home sellable, it’s altering its appearance to the point where just about anyone who walks through the front door will be able to envision themselves living in it. This is easier said than done, because in effect it requires you to remove all “signature,” personal elements of your existence in your home. If you’re a movie lover and have beautiful framed movie posters hanging in every room of your home, remember that a potential buyer might be distracted by your quirky sense of style to the point where they won’t be able to picture themselves living in the home. This can be bad news. But removing the occasional wall poster isn’t all there is to staging your home.
Tips to Staging Your Home
- De-characterize your home. This doesn’t mean that you should paint all of your walls white and leave it completely empty. It does mean, however, that you should arrange your home to resemble a model home as closely as possible. This includes removing family photos from walls and arranging for your pet to be conveniently absent anytime the house is shown. You might also consider painting your red dining room beige.
- Clean, clean, clean. Your home should be immaculate. Unwashed floors and dirty windows are an absolute no-no, as are stacks of books in random corners and piles of dirty laundry. Pay particular attention to the bathroom and the kitchen; these are two of the most important rooms in your home in the eyes of home shoppers.
- Maximize storage space. Rent a self-storage unit away from your home so that potential buyers doing a walk-through of your home can see how much storage space they’ll have available to them. It’s one thing to see lots of empty space and another thing entirely to see a closet stuffed to the ceiling with moving boxes.
- Rent furniture. Accept it: not everyone is going to think as highly of that comfy chair you’ve had for decades as you do, and in the eyes of a possible buyer it might even come off looking like an eyesore. Consider moving all of your furniture into the aforementioned self-storage facility and renting home furniture sets for all rooms.
In the end, a successful home staging makes it possible for a complete stranger to waltz into your home and immediately imagine living there. This isn’t exactly easy and it’s not an entirely common practice. But in today’s real estate market, you have to do everything your power to sell your home so that you can make your dreams of moving a reality. Home staging is a huge part of turning that dream into a reality.
If you’re planning a move, contact us to see how we can help!
