Prepping your home for sale - Staging - A Realtor's hand picked suggestions

Maximize the light in your home. After location, good light is the one thing that every buyer cites that they want in a home. Take down the drapes, clean the windows, change the lampshades, increase the wattage of your light bulbs and cut the bushes outside to let in sunshine. Do what you have to do make your house bright and cheery – it will make it more sellable.

Tips for Staging

If you’re thinking about having your home staged, here are a few tips for getting it done right:

1. Do a deep clean. The last thing you want is for grimy baseboards and dirty bathrooms to detract from a beautiful staging job. Before you move in the staging items, have your home deep cleaned so that it’s move-in ready. You might want to hire a professional cleaning service to handle this step.
2. Do a smell test. People easily get used to the smell of their own home and don’t notice a difference until they’ve left the house for a while and walk back in and sometimes, something smells off. This can be a deterrent to a prospective homebuyer walking in for the first time. It’s also why real estate agents will bake cookies or use cookie-scented candles when staging empty homes, to make it feel more homely.

1. Choose one or two key rooms. Staging an entire house can get expensive, especially if you end up renting furniture for a few months. But you don’t necessarily need to stage every room. Instead, focus on a couple of key rooms, such as the living room and kitchen, so prospective buyers can get a sense of what it would be like to live there.
2. Stage according to budget and lifestyle. If you’re selling a cozy beach cottage, it wouldn’t make sense to stage it with luxury leather furniture and expensive art pieces. Similarly, if you’re trying to sell a modern condo near downtown, a shabby-chic look probably isn’t going to inspire buyers. Think about the general budget of prospective buyers and what their ideal living space would look like.
3. Keep it minimal. You don’t need to fully furnish rooms as you would if someone were actually going to be living there. Instead, you want to provide the property with a certain aesthetic and general feel of hominess. Keep the number of items in each room to a minimum, and place them away from walls. Decorate the walls and shelves sparingly. If you do paint the walls, use light, simple colors to help open up the space.