Knowing how to stage your house to get people to buy in Middletown, Dayton, or Cincinnati is one of the key ingredients in selling your house quicker and at a better price. Staging involves strategically arranging décor and furnishings to make your house look it’s absolute best and showcase the best features. It may even involve renting décor or furnishings to get the job done right. In any case, the ultimate goal is to allow prospective buyers to be able to envision your house as their home. So let’s see what it takes to stage for selling.
Understanding the Reasons and Purpose
Staging your house to get people to buy is like anything else: you can always do a better job when you understand the rationale behind it – why it exists and what it is meant to accomplish. A 2017 NAR survey revealed that:
- 77% of buyer’s agents maintain that staging makes it easier for buyers to visualize a property as their own future home.
- 38%of seller’s agents always stage homes before listing.
- The most commonly staged rooms are the living room (83%), the kitchen (76%), the master bedroom (69%), and the dining room (66%).
Experience shows that staged homes sell at a higher price and sell faster than unstaged homes. According to that same survey, over a quarter of seller’s agents say that staged homes sell for 1% to 5% more than unstaged homes. And 39% of agents agree that staging your house significantly decreases its time on the market. It’s fairly obvious, then, that the cost of staging can be more than offset with a faster sale at a higher price.
De-Cluttering
You know that you should de-clutter, but to stage your house to get people to buy in Middletown, Dayton, or Cincinnati, de-cluttering will have to involve more than just straightening up and getting rid of superfluous junk. The true aim of de-cluttering is depersonalizing your home. You need to remove anything that stamps your home with your personality, for example, family photos, idiosyncratic knick-knacks, bizarre wall colors.
And you can’t just stuff all that junk into closets either. Buyers are nosy (which is understandable) and will poke into every nook and cranny, including looking inside closets. Your best bet, then, is to rent a storage unit to keep all the personal stuff in you don’t want to get ride of.
Bright Look in Most Important Room
Further, to stage your house to get people to buy, you want to strive for a light, bright look, but only in the most important rooms first. Achieving this bright look will entail replacing heavy drapes and blinds with lighter sheers, cleaning windows, and replacing dingy lampshades and light fixtures. You may even need to add lighting, either lamps or overhead fixtures, in darker areas.
Staging your entire house is certainly a good idea, but it’s best to deal with the important rooms, the ones that matter most to buyers, first. As you saw in the statistics above, these rooms (in order of descending importance) are the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, and dining room. Because the living room is the most critical space, you should start there and then move on to other rooms.
Attention to Furniture
The general rule of thumb here to stage your house to get people to buy in Middletown, Dayton, or Cincinnati is to get rid of about half your furniture. (Another reason a storage unit is a great idea.) Of course, it’s difficult for most people to let go of their beloved furnishings, but it will make your house appear more spacious, as well as being more appealing to buyers. You need to try to get past the emotional attachment and see your house as a product that needs to be packaged in the best way possible for a sale.
In addition, if your furniture isn’t in the best of shape, if it doesn’t have that showroom-ready appearance, then you might consider renting some better-looking furniture to temporarily replace yours with. If you’ve already moved into your new home and don’t have any furniture left in the old one, some “pop-up furniture” is a viable option. This is furniture made of corrugated plastic or cardboard. It’s not real furniture but looks like it.
And finally, regarding furniture, the arrangement is critical. You should do what is called “floating” the furniture – that is, place chairs, tables, couches and so on slightly away from walls, not right up against them. Staging professionals also advise using an area rug to anchor the space and create a cozy, intimate feeling. In addition, position furniture with the biggest, tallest pieces on the left as you enter the room, with pieces in descending size as you move to the right. This is how the eye scans a room as you enter, and this arrangement makes a room seem bigger.
Inclusion of Extras
The last part of staging is the inclusion of extras, little finishing touches that show care. These could include new towels in the bathroom (white is best) and flowers in vases. Proper staging is both an art and a science, and your experienced agent can provide needed guidance.