Staging Your Home: How to Get the Most for Your Money
- In This Quick Guide:
- Your “Before” Pictures
- The Sniff Test
- Styling Trends
Staging your home will certainly make it more appealing to buyers, but whether it will be more appealing than other homes in your area will depend on how well you’ve done your homework. By knowing what they have and what they’re asking, you can play up your home’s positives to make it more attractive to potential buyers.
Your “Before” Pictures
You need to objectively assess how your home stacks up against the competition—and the key word is objective. That means taking a step back and looking at your home through the eyes of a buyer. The best way to do this is to take several pictures of each room in your home. Start by going outside and taking a picture of your home from the curb, to see what buyers driving by would see. Then take another one from the driveway, moving closer and taking in the whole front yard. Then come inside and take a photo from the landing. Take some more views once you’re inside—three or four shots into each room.
Move room to room, as a real estate agent and buyer would, capturing the picture of the room from the doorway and then more once you’re inside. Take pictures inside closets, inside the pantry, and out in the backyard. Pretend you’re a buyer and snap away.
Then have prints made but don’t look at them immediately. Set them aside for a few days, to get distance from what you just saw.
Once a few days have passed, leave your home and go somewhere to review your pictures. It’s very important that you not do this inside your home. Photos don’t lie—they will show you exactly what your home looks like to outsiders. But if you’re sitting at home looking at the pictures of each room, you can look around and convince yourself that it doesn’t really look as bad as the photos make it out to be. And you’d be fooling yourself, because it may actually be in need of some serious help.
The Sniff Test
The most difficult thing to be objective about, no matter how hard you try, is your home’s smell. Every home has one, of course, but some are more potent than others and some are more objectionable. Many homeowners skip this test and focus solely on furniture arrangement, cleaning, and accessorizing, but they miss out on a key factor in the home buying process. The fact is that no matter how gorgeous a home, if it has an unpleasant odor, it will be much harder to sell. A bad odor instantly gives a home a sense of not being as clean as it may be.
The best way to assess what your home smells like, and then what you can do about it, is to ask a friend who doesn’t come over much to visit. Ask them to be brutally honest about what they smell when they walk in the home. Explain that their honesty will help you make some changes that will lead to more money in your pocket.
Remember that odors don’t have to be strong to kill a sale. More people than you realize are extra sensitive to smells. Even the faintest odor can make a huge difference in the appeal of your house.
Some stagers and real estate agents make contracts with the owner that they will not smoke inside the house when it is on the market nor will they cook fish. These smells can linger for days.
There are a number of sources of scents and odors, some of which you might not be aware:
- Smoking
- Animals/pets
- Ethnic cooking
- Incontinence
- Medicine, such as vaporizers or rubs
With a friend’s help you can identify any odors, track down the source, and eliminate it, to make your home more attractive to buyers.
Once you have eliminated the bad odors, use subtle fragrances to make the property feel more desirable. However, it is never appropriate in today’s world of full disclosure to mask odors such as mold or mildew.
Styling Trends
Most buyers don’t want a home that is out of style, or outdated. The general guideline for being in or out of style is that if the decorating style in your home is more than 10 years old, it is outdated. Knowing what is currently considered stylish in home décor will help you once you begin to rearrange and style your home to appeal to buyers.
There are two reasons why you need to be on trend:
- If the decorating message is up-to-date, people will assume the mechanics of the home (plumbing, wiring, etc.) are also up-to-date.
- If the decorating message is fresh, buyers will associate it with good taste and increased status.
To find out what’s on trend, look to decorating and women’s magazines for inspiration, and try to emulate the style of the rooms you see—but don’t try and follow them precisely. The idea is to create the general look and feel.
The style message to look for as you are reviewing magazines and catalogs is the color. You will probably be painting your spaces a soft neutral to sell, but what about the other colors? If you don’t see much navy blue in the magazine layouts, for example, then you will want to remove your navy accent pillow from the couch. Opt instead for something in a color everyone is raving about in print.
Trends in accessories are also something to look for. Big accessories are more “in” than lots of small accessories. Think a large vase instead of several little ones.
Another important thing to do is to rearrange your furniture to focus on the elements of each room that will sell the house. Use room layouts in the magazines as a guide to the overall impression your rooms should make. At this stage, you might even consider hiring a stager or redesigner who is trained in this area.
Staging your home for sale is the most important thing you can do to increase its salability, and with these tips you’ll be on your way to doing it right. Good luck, and happy selling!
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Staging Your Home to Sell by Julie Dana and Marcia Layton Turner
