Home Staging – 10 tips for better sale

Are you interested in selling your house fast and for top dollar?
If the answer is ‘YES’, then you need to get it ready to look and feel its best. The concept of Home Staging is not new and is used extensively in the USA and Western Canada to market real estate.

These Home Staging tips cover some of the things you can easily do yourself at a minimal cost.

1. Before you do anything, you have to stop thinking of your house as a HOME and start thinking about it as an investment, for which you want the largest return possible.
2. If you don’t have pictures that show your house at its best, you are probably missing out on dozens, if not hundreds of potential buyers.
3. Curb appeal (or, lack of thereof) can deter a visitor from wanting to pursue. The exterior of your house has to be clean and taken care of.
4. Buyers want to see space, above anything else. You have to declutter, so the visitors can focus on the house and not on your stuff.
5. Chipped paint, loose or missing tiles, broken door handle, a closet door that doesn’t quite close properly can become a BIG turnoff for a potential buyer. Fix!
6. Painting is the cheapest way to transform a room! Repaint main rooms in fresh, neutral colors.
7. Refresh and update. Simple things such as a new bed ensemble, a few decorative pillows and two nice table lamps will transform a bedroom.
8. Make the house as neutral as possible to please a variety of potential buyers and their lifestyle and taste.
9. Make sure there is sufficient light in every room– you can’t have too much light!
10. Space optimization and proper furniture and accessories placement is essential. It will give a home a warm and appealing look and feel and create the WOW factor.

So, a small effort will pay of at the sale time. Stage your house-sell your house WELL!

A Staged house that sold in 3 hours

I wanted to share this recent story with you – a Staged house sells in 3 hours! Of course it’s exceptional but it does happen inspite of a slower real estate market.

I was recently asked to help a lady prepare her home for sale. The house is small (2 bedrooms only and a very small office), but very well located and well maintained. The paint was recent and the color neutral enough on the main floor but needed to be refreshed in a couple of rooms on the upper floor.

The problem? Old and outdated furniture, outdated and darkish curtains, some clutter and several personal items, such as the owner’s artwork displayed everywhere in the house (pretty but not to everyone’s taste).

We worked on a very limited budget (approximately $700). I made a list of accessories to purchase and we split the tasks – I went off to IKEA and the owner shopped in smaller local stores to locate items such as decorative pillows, a vase, branches, a mirror and some fabric. She repainted her old dining room table a dark brown (instead of a previous blue color) and recovered the chairs with dark brown microsuede fabric. She also repainted a small office and a bathroom over a weekend. The seller also worked very hard to declutter and put some of her furniture in storage.

Last, but not least, we rented two small white chairs and we reorganized her furniture to optimize the spaces, changed the curtains on the living room and set up the accessories.

Before

After

As soon as the photographs appeared on the Internet, the phone started to ring. Three appointments were set up for the evening. The second visitors made and offer to purchase on the spot and it was accepted. The house sold the same day for %96 of the asking price. End of story!

Home Staging: an invaluable marketing tool

The concept of Home Staging is finally taking firm hold in the minds of Quebec consumers and Real Estate agents. Home Staging techniques originated in California over 30 years ago and are an accepted and widely used real estate service in the USA. I have had a couple of clients from California who wanted to sell their properties in Montreal and they told me that no self respecting home owner there would show their property without staging it first!

Especially valuable in a tough market, Home Staging helps sellers and Real Estate agents to sell properties faster and for better price.

The 2008 www.Homegain.com survey of 4000 real estate agents asked:

How much do you think staging increases the value of a home? Read more

So, you think you don’t need Home Staging?

You have decided to sell your property. You love the home decorating shows on TV. You have good taste and you house is well decorated. You are ready to put the property on the market. But, are you really?

I often hear this kind of thinking from certain home sellers, especially women. It’s perfectly normal, as home decorating is becoming an established hobby and is well represented all over the media (on TV, magazines, books, Internet, etc). That’s great!

But, please remember that Home Staging is a set of specific and very efficient techniques. The goal of Staging a home is not at all the same either; we decorate our house for ourselves, in accordance with our personal taste whether the Home Staging is decorating for others, namely the potential buyers! The point of view is completely the opposite – instead of personalizing, we actually depersonalize the property for sale!

And, another important point: it’s very difficult to be objective about your own home. As long as you look at it as a “home” and not as a real estate investment, you won’t be able to present it at its best FOR SALE.

A professional and impartial Home Stager will execute an assessment of your property and will provide you with recommendations to make the property irresistible to buyers. The assessment may show more or less changes to be made to the property but, believe me, in three years, I have still to see a “PERFECT” house!

Written by Sveta Melchuk from www.Home-Staging-Montreal.com.
A Montreal firm specializing in Home Staging and Interior Re-design services.

Staging a vacant house

by Sveta Melchuk

Home staging is an important marketing technique for selling homes, whether they are furnished or vacant.

Important points to remember about vacant properties are:

• People buy «Homes» and not «Houses»: it’s therefore essential to give them the feeling of a «Home» and you certainly won’t be able to achieve that with an empty space!
• A vast majority of people (over 90%) can’t imagine what a house could look like with furniture in it and they have nothing to compare their own furnishings to in an empty space. Did you know that a room actually looks smaller empty than properly furnished?
• With nothing to focus on except the bare space, the negatives will become more apparent to prospective buyers.
• A vacant house gives an impression of a desperate situation and you can expect to get lower offers than otherwise.

So, to sell your property fast and for most money, what do you need to do?
Read more