Staging your house to sell
Staging your house to sell:
5 Tips & Ideas
You are selling your house and you want to draw the most attention as possible to get as many potential buyers through the door. Whether you are listing with a Realtor or listing as For Sale By Owner the challenges are the same. Get as many buyers through the door as possible. That is easier said than done sometimes. In the current market just having your property on the market is usually enough to get it the attention to sale. Regardless, staging your home is important because it could make or break the buyer from choosing your house over another. The key to any staging is getting the potential buyer to see themselves in your house. Here I will provide a few tips to hopefully help get the buyers through your door.
#1. Declutter. You want to present the best version of your house as possible. To do that you may need to remove some items from the room you are staging. If you have too many furniture pieces or too large of pieces in the room it will cause the room to feel small. The same is true for large rooms with very little or small pieces of furniture. You also want to limit the amount of items in the room like nick nacks or collectables. Now may be a good time to put some of these items away not just to declutter but also for safe keeping.
Depersonalizing the home falls under decluttering for you want the potential buyers to see themselves in your home and not you. One way to do this is removing or at least limiting the “wall of Fame”. It is ok to have a few family photos, but you don’t want to overwhelm buyers to the point where they may only see you and your family's memories in the house. The more they can imagine themselves in the house the better. Another place that sellers tend to forget to take this step with is the refrigerator. That is probably the biggest location for the “wall of fame” in a house.
#2 Curb appeal. Curb appeal is probably one of the top items to look at when selling your house. A lot of times potential buyers see your house when driving through the neighborhood and see the For Sale sign in the front yard. When they see the For Sale sign and what lays behind it the look of the front yard could determine whether or not the potential buyer wants to pursue additional information. Fortunately, curb appeal is one of the easiest to address. Usually just keeping up with your normal yard maintenance routine is enough. Your yard doesn’t need to look like the yard from the Biltmore house, but it does need to look nice and cared for.
Things you can do to improve your curb appeal is add fresh flowers. An easy way to do this is to get a few flower hanging baskets. Pruning back overgrown bushes and trees, especially ones right in front of the house. Remember, the point is to show off the house. Anything that distracts from that is a negative.
#3 Identifying the space/room. If you have several rooms that are not used for example you have a 3 bedroom house and you only use one as a bedroom and the other is a guest bedroom when they visit and the 3rd is just a dumping ground for everything needing to be stored. Start with that 3rd room and give it an identity. Make it a 3rd bedroom or an office so you are showing the potential uses for the room. Sometimes buyers need to be shown the possibilities of a room. An open concept house where the living room, dining room and kitchen all share the same space, you want to identify the space for each area. Yes that seems like “well duh” but it is sometimes surprising how many are not set up that way. THe current owners have it set up for what works for them, which is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. When you are going to sell, again, you are trying to show the best version of your house.
#4 Deodorize the house. Some may say that this step is not part of staging . I would have to disagree. It is one of the 1st things that buyers notice when they walk in the house. When a buyer walks through the door for the 1st time other than the layout of the house what is the 1st thing they will notice? They smell the life of the house. Whether it be good or bad. When they walk in the house, you don’t want them to feel as if they just got knocked out by Mike Tyson. If you have pets and kids and well just live in your house or if it is/was an investment property, there may be smells that could distract the buyers from what the house is or could be for them. The biggest culprit of scents are pets and smoke whether it is cigarette or other smoke scents. They both have their challenges to get rid of. Eliminating or at least limiting the potency of these smells or any smells will greatly help the appeal of your house. Pet smells, the individuals living in the house may not notice because they live with it daily. The same can be said of any scent in the house. A few ideas to remove or at least reduce the scent is to have the carpets cleaned. No matter how many times we have vacuumed the carpet we still don’t get everything out of them. Depending on the age of the carpet the best remedy may be to replace the carpet. Another option could be to give a carpet allowance. Talk with your Realtor, if using one, on their recommendation. Scents in the house can also be a double edged sword. Too potent of a good smell could draw a conclusion of trying to hide other scents. It is a fine line and you need to be careful either way.
#5 Bright lights. Just like when you have photos of your family done and the photographer uses lights to get the best image of you you want to do the same for your house. The photographer who takes the pictures of your house, if you use one, will want as much light in each room as possible without causing issues. I like using LED daylight bulbs throughout the house. Bringing in as much natural light as possible helps too. A large number of buyers LOVE natural light, so if you have the benefit of having large windows then show it off and let in that light. The bright light of the house helps implant the images of your house in the buyers minds, so make it good.
These are just a few tips in staging your house to sell. You can get as into the weeds as you want and throw as much money as you want at it. Keeping it simple is always the best method. Just keeping to your normal routine in yard care, cleaning and house maintenance can be just what you need. Adding a few touches can enhance your house and with any luck speed up the sale of getting your house sold. Course, the current market won’t hurt either.
Jeremy Lemm
Inland Northwest Real Estate Adventure
Coldwell Banker Tomlinson
509.217.9904
For more on staging your house to sale you can check out these articles:
https://www.hgtv.com/lifestyle/real-estate/15-secrets-of-home-staging-pictures
https://magazine.realtor/home-and-design/feature/article/2020/03/why-staging-matters
https://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/home-improvement/home-staging-tips
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