Explore the transformative power of home staging and how it can elevate your home's market appeal. Read on to learn more about its benefits.
Like selling any type of product, there are ineffective ways to sell your home and proven ways to optimize your sale –– in terms of both effort and a higher price. One way to maximize your sale is by working with a skilled real estate agent who can leverage their vast knowledge and smooth the process. Or you can maximize both profit and efficiency by staging your home so a prospective buyer can see it in its best light.
Read on as we discuss the benefits of staging a home and some simple ways you can stage your home successfully.
Have you spent an afternoon (or maybe an entire day) strolling through IKEA, imagining your life in the miles and miles of picture-perfect rooms? If so, you’ve experienced firsthand the power of effective and professional staging. Rather than having you look at rows of furniture surrounded by blank walls, IKEA immerses you in scenes that feel just the right amount of lived in. There’s no clutter, but there is character.
Home staging is a popular pre-sale practice that can make your home more inviting and more marketable, allowing potential buyers to imagine their new lives in your home. By adhering to some of the same principles as IKEA, you can use staging to help buyers understand the space and how they might add their own personalized touches to it.
But staging your home doesn’t mean turning it into a movie set. We’ll discuss home staging tips –– ranging from simple to studio-quality.
Staging your home requires extra work and perhaps an additional home staging cost if you hire a professional. But it can make a serious difference when it comes to maximizing your sale. Here are some of the key reasons to consider staging your home.
These days, nearly all home buyers rely on the internet to find their next property. This means that, in the sea of online listing sameness, it’s all the more important that your home stands out.1 Staging your home can add some much-needed visual appeal as potential buyers click through your listing. This goal can be achieved by optimizing the layout of furniture, accentuating the space with neutral but stylish decor, and ensuring the lighting showcases your home’s best features. With this, you can attract more buyer interest –– and keep it all through the sale process.
There’s a statistical advantage to staging: staged homes tend to sell for more and in less time than their non-staged counterparts. This is because staging highlights each of the home’s best features while making it look move-in ready. Home buyers are often willing to pay a higher price for properties that look and feel ready for immediate occupancy. Playing on this preference can lead to faster sales and more favorable terms for you as the seller.2
Returning to the IKEA example, compare their showroom floors to the themeless warehouse floors. On one, you have cozy scenes of inviting environments. On the other, aisles of disassembled products with little more context than a price tag. Just as IKEA’s staged rooms help shoppers understand the intended use of a product range, staging makes a world of difference in helping homebuyers envision their lives in a space.
With that said, effective home staging should be welcoming but not too personalized, as removing the personal footprint of the current homeowner presents a neutral yet appealing environment.
Potential buyers form opinions about your home long before they first set foot in the space. Prior to scheduling a tour, buyers are scrolling for hours on end, clicking through and closely examining every available photo of the property. Among hundreds and thousands of generic listings, a staged home tells a story –– making a compelling argument as to why shoppers should pause their scrolling and take a closer look. When they do finally tour your home, they’ll already have a relationship with the space. Buyers who can easily picture hosting dinners in the dining room or relaxing in a cozy living room tend to be more likely to be motivated to bid aggressively.
The benefits of staging a home are clear. And, as it turns out, reaping these benefits may be easier than you think.
After living in the same place for years (or maybe even decades) you accumulate a fair amount of, well, stuff. Decluttering to ensure your entire life isn’t on display is one of the easiest and most effective ways to stage your home. By packing away unnecessary personal items and belongings, you’ll find that the home appears larger, cleaner, and more inviting. It doesn’t have to be an entirely blank canvas, though –– strategic personal touches like tasteful artwork, soft lighting, or a coffee table book can add charm and character without making the space feel overly personal. Create a home staging checklist to help guide you — and discover what items are too personal or cluttered to keep for your staged home.
Your home likely has a “good” side: its unique selling features and the attributes that distinguish it from everything else on the market. Your mission for staging should be to identify and accentuate these more flattering angles. Whether it’s a cozy breakfast nook, a luminous sunroom, or custom-built shelving, these features should be front and center. Stage your home by strategically placing both furniture and decor to draw the eye to these areas, ensuring they are impossible for buyers to overlook.
As we’ve mentioned above, staging is not just something buyers will experience in person. In fact, staging may be more crucial to an online listing than to an open house. So, after you've invested time and effort in staging your home, make the most of your efforts by capturing the essence of your staged spaces through professional photography. Professional photographers possess the skills and equipment necessary to produce high-quality images that highlight the beauty and functionality of your home –– while ensuring that the charm of your home shines through online as in real life.
If you’re looking to save money, you can certainly play the role of photographer. Just be mindful of lighting, framing, and the other elements a professional might use to create a visual appeal for potential buyers.
If you’re looking to maximize your sale, staging your home is a great place to start. Professional stagers or not, it can help you sell quicker while simultaneously netting you a larger return on your investment. You may even receive a higher offer for your efforts. But there are other ways to optimize the sale of your home.
With Truehold’s sale-leaseback, you can effectively eliminate “online listings” and “professional staging” from your vocabulary, opting instead for one of the easiest ways to sell your home. So easy, in fact, that you don’t even have to move out right away –– you can continue living in your home as a renter while you look for your perfect next place, whether that takes a few months or years.
Want to skip out on staging and learn more about Truehold’s sale-leaseback instead? Connect with one of Truehold’s trusted advisors today and discover a simpler way to sell your home.
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