When selling your house, staging allows your
house to be the star, not your furnishings,
collections, and clutter.
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Top Staging Articles:
Staging your house for top dollar
Staging your house just before it goes on the market can make a dramatic improvement in your sales. Staging's goal is to highlight the home's strengths and downplay its weaknesses. House staging is the biggest house-effect out there and for good reason: it works!
8 Staging Steps
8 easy steps that you can use for each room in your home to stage it quickly and professionally.
Staging Your Dining Room
Dining rooms were once a symbol of wealth. Ordinary middle class people ate in the kitchen. Then every new home had to have a dining room and people found out that it wasn't a lot of fun eating in the dining room every night.
Exterior Staging:
giving your house CURB APPEAL
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Clutter - Remove clutter from the exterior of your home. This includes garbage cans, discarded wood scraps and building materials. Also, remove all small items including small planters, flowerpots, charcoal, barbecues and toys from the patios and decks. It is better to have all of this distraction in the garage.
Read: Self Storage Options
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Roof - Ensure that the roof is free from overgrown landscaping and gutters are clean and in the correct position.
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Landscaping - landscape plants must be neatly trimmed. Where the lawn meets garden areas, it should be edged, especially around bushes and trees. Clear weeds from flowerbeds, add extra mulch, and prune.
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Windows - Windows should be sparkling and clean, and provide unobstructed views from inside looking out. That means removing or trimming up overgrown landscaping.
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Paint and Siding - Look at the exterior walls of your home. Does it need paint, re-sided, could power washing help?
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Front Door - the front door must be in good shape. Repair and repaint as needed.
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Staging is the new catch phrase for faster sales
Today, especially when the real estate market is contracting, it is important to take advantage of every trick in the book to get your home sold as fast as possible and for top dollar.
One of those tricks is called staging.
Staging is the processing of making your house seem bigger, brighter, cleaner and ideal dwelling for almost any prospect that inspects your property. Staging helps prospects visualize themselves in this house and allows them to mentally make it their home.
Staging is not designed to make your house more livable for you and your family. In fact, it is a bit of hardship to live in a staged house during the selling process.
You and your family will literally be out of your comfort zone. Everything that makes your house your home will for the most part be gone. But remember: this is only temporary. Believe me, having your house on the market is a real drag anyway. Your agent will give you short notice that a "hot prospect" wants to see it RIGHT NOW! Not when you're comfortable, but now. So anything that shortens that "on the market" time will be worth it, even if it means a little more temporary discomfort.
Staging is more than just cleaning,
painting, and making repairs.
Once your house has been cleaned, painted, and repaired, and before it is ready to be shown to the public, this is when staging is implemented. Staging is all about the details of how the house is presented.
Staging is NOT decorating. Decorating means personalizing your house to your tastes and whims. Staging is about getting your house sold.
In a nutshell, staging is reducing the furnishings to bare minimums and creating vignettes inside each room and perhaps multiple vignettes for certain rooms. A completely empty room has no life.
A room filled with personal photos, hobby items, etc. is filled with so much homeowner personality that prospects feel they are intruding into someone's private life. This is not what a house seller wants. HOUSE SELLERS WANT PROSPECTS TO SEE THEMSELVES IN THE HOUSE, NOT HOW SOMEONE ELSE LIVES.
Common accessories might include:
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Mirrors
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Cut flowers in attractive vases
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Fresh fruit
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Up lights, table lamps and floor lights
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Ottomans
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Pillows & baskets
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Scented soap bars
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Fresh towels
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Ironed crisp bed sheets
You might be tempted to feel that since you're selling your house and moving to a new one, that you don't want to invest anymore money into this property and save that money for your new home. As Ben Franklin once said: "Don't be penny wise and pound foolish." Staging is investing a small amount for the most important investment you'll probably ever make: your house!
If your house doesn't have that certain appeal, that lacks attention to detail, then real estate agents will be less inclined to show the property, simply because they know what the your competition is doing and their time and their buyer's time is valuable-- why waste it on a property they know most buyers will pass on?
Read more about staging:
Additional staging info
Less is more
In selling real estate, less is more in more than one category. Less clutter is good. Less furniture is good. And less time on the market is really good.
THE National Association of Realtors recently conducted a survey of house sales and found that the longer a house stays on the market, the further below listing price it drops.
Houses selling in the first 4 weeks averaged 1 percent more than the asking price.
Houses selling 4 - 12 weeks averaged 5 percent less than asking.
Houses selling 13 to 24 weeks averaged 6.4 percent less than asking price.
Houses selling 24 weeks averaged more than 10 percent less than the asking price.