Staging
your home is a proven strategy for speeding up the sales process. It can even
help boost your home’s value when offers start coming in. By highlighting your
home’s strengths and giving prospective buyers a sense of how they’d utilize
different spaces, you can help these prospects develop emotional attachments to
your home.
Here
are some quick tips for helping you along with the staging process:
Pay
attention to lighting
Great
lighting is crucial for making your home look warm and welcoming. If you notice
that some areas of your home are dark and dreary, increase the wattages of the
lightbulbs in the fixtures and lamps. A good rule of thumb is to have a total
of 100 watts of lighting for every 50 square feet of interior space. Also, you
should strive for three different types of lighting per room: accent lighting
(on a wall or table), task lighting (such as a reading or under-cabinet light),
and ambient lighting (overhead).
Update
your appliances
Alright,
so you might not be willing to spend thousands of dollars on installing new,
stainless steel appliances just for staging. However, studies show that new
appliances in the kitchen garner high returns for sellers, which means you
stand to get a better price for you home. A great, inexpensive solution is to
apply stainless steel stick-on coverings to all of your appliances. These
coverings can quickly transform an outdated kitchen into one that screams
ultra-modern.
Get
rid of unnecessary furniture
It
should go without saying that when staging a home, you need to get rid of
clutter. However, sellers often forget about some of the biggest causes of
clutter: namely, couches, chairs, and tables. Having too much furniture in your
home can make it seem small and cramped. So before you start showing your home,
take a walk around and remove furniture items that you can live without. You
don’t need to get rid of everything (afterall, you want the space to look
lived-in), but you want to make sure you’re maximizing available space.
