Staging Your Greatest Asset

Recently I had an opportunity to attend several workshops on Home Staging offered by local, Oakville real estate agents and staging professionals. Home Staging and Redesign is an interior decorating technique used to show off your home's best features, making it more attractive for a potential buyer when selling your home. It can boost your home’s selling price, as well as shorten the amount of time the home stays on the market. Home staging is a crucial and strategic marketing step every homeowner needs to consider before listing their home. On average, a staged home may sell for approximately 7-10% more, and sells in half the time of a comparable home that is not staged.

The Home Stagers provided some real valuable information about important steps to take in preparing a home for sale. They offered basic strategies that not only applied to staging or styling a home for resale, but also for generally maintaining your home’s value through simple updating and de-cluttering, on a regular basis. Your home is your greatest asset and most significant financial investment. It’s therefore crucial to preserve your equity with regular maintenance and updating.

What tends to happen is the longer we live in a space, the more we get used to and overlook the flaws or dysfunctional areas in the home. Daily routines take over. We become complacent to our surroundings. This leads to clutter, disorganization, dated, mismatched belongings, and generally, stressful environment. However, just as we take time to care for our personal appearance by buying a new outfit, getting a new haircut or trying a new shade of lipstick every once and a while, we need to update our homes, as well. Staging a home allows it to almost sell itself by making a great first impression, showcasing the house in the best possible light to a potential buyer, and allows them to visualize themselves living in that home.

Home improvement projects can have a major impact on the value of your resale home. But if you’re not prepared to invest dollars on a renovation just yet, here are some tips to consider in your annual maintenance checklist - whether you’re deciding to sell your home, or just tidy up a few things.

1. Spruce up your curb appeal and landscaping:
Healthy, neat, and trimmed yards and flower beds is the first step in getting potential buyers to want to walk up to the front door. The last thing they want to see is your "stuff" all around the yard, so make sure toys, gardening tools and garbage bins are put away. A well maintained exterior planter or fresh sod in the front yard can make a world of difference.

2. Thorough cleaning and fixing of visible repairs in all areas of the home, especially the kitchen, bathrooms, floors and closets:
A dirty house or broken door knob is an immediate turn-off. The two most important areas are the kitchen and bathrooms. If you have not deep cleaned all counter and tile surfaces to a spotless condition, you stand the chance of losing the buyer. Another critical area is the closets and your floors (especially older carpets and rugs). Closets should be well organized and not jammed pack. Take the time to go through them, and purge or store some things which you don’t use on the regular basis. Without question, spotty carpets are a total turn-off, and leave people wondering what caused the original stain in the first place. Steam cleaners do wonders!

3. De-clutter your entire home:
Clutter, both inside and outside your home makes it extremely hard for the buyers to visualize moving into your home. It leaves them feeling like your home is too much work! The disorganization will distract the buyer’s ability to focus on your space and they will overlook your best selling features. Also, clutter makes your home appear smaller than it is. At the end of the day, people are buying “space” – that’s generally why they’re looking to move in the first place.

4. De-personalize your entire home:
Your home is your comfort zone and is filled with all of your personal treasures, pictures, and memories – another huge distraction when selling your home. The way we live day to day, and how we merchandise a house, are two different things. People are generally curious, and when you really want them to notice the beautiful entranceway, they may be focused on all the family pictures on the shelves, or the "stuff" all over your refrigerator. Your objective is to change the view of your home from "lived in" to "ready to move in”. You want to turn it into a commodity by neutralizing the decor, and generally making it look like an easy move for the buyer.

5. Updating paint colours inside and out:
While your favourite colours may be a reflection of your style, your choices may cause a buyer to lose interest because it evokes a certain feeling in that room. Or your favourite wall paper may not be in the buyer’s taste. The best way to present a home is for the wall colours to be painted a neutral color. This goes for the outside as well – a loud or non-neutral colour may just keep the buyers from even stopping to see the inside. Instead, choose bold or trendy colours in your accessories.

6. Make pet’s and children’s toys disappear:
Let’s face it, children’s and pet’s things can take over your house. The presence of food, toys, books, and boxes are generally a turn-off. They should really be contained in principle rooms of the house, so buyers are not distracted from the prime objective – viewing your home in the best possible light.

Hope that’s a start. Good luck with your home staging projects this spring.