Make Your Home Gorgeous to Attract Quality Buyers

When Valentine’s Day rolls around, you might think about loving your spouse. Your romantic partner. Maybe your kids or your pets.

But what about making your home attractive … to potential buyers? If you’re selling your house and haven’t thought about staging, you absolutely should. A little bit of effort returns huge rewards.

And makes buyers fall in love. With your home.

How Staging Impacts Home Sales

A well-staged home can sell up to 73% faster, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Over 81% of potential home buyers in the U.S. said that viewing a staged home made it easier to imagine themselves living there, which is a key emotional element to every successful home sale.

And if you think it’s too big a cost, you haven’t considered the ROI. Turns out that staged homes sell for more than 6% above the asking price, according to a survey conducted by the Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation.

Top Home Staging Tips

If you have no idea what “staging” means or how to do it, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered with the best home staging ideas you can do quickly and easily.

Here are the Top 5 home staging tips you’ll love … and buyers will love too.

1. Remove Yourself from the Equation

Buyers find it hard to imagine themselves in a home dominated by someone else’s mementos. So the #1 tip from staging experts is to remove your personal items, like family photos, diplomas, sports trophies and plaques, your kids’ drawings, and so forth. The more you can take yourself out of the picture, the more a buyer can imagine themselves living there instead.

While you’re at it, be sure to give your home a good cleaning from top to bottom. The added benefit here is you’re also protecting your privacy by not having your personal life on display for strangers.

2. KISS (Keep it Simple … and Sweet!)

This is great advice in most areas of life. But it’s pretty crucial when staging your home. As you remove your personal items, keep any added décor simple. Think minimalist and clean, with only a few key pieces of furniture in each space, and definitely no clutter.

This will make your rooms appear larger. In addition, you want your real estate agent to immediately know what each room or area is for, and to spark ideas for a buyer. So a kids’ room can have a few pieces of strategic kid-friendly décor and a bit of color. A den can have a bookcase with some carefully placed books. All this looks professional while showing buyers a vision of how they can use various rooms.

3. Empty Out the Storage Room

It’s tempting to take all the clutter from other rooms and stash it in one storage space where you think it’s out of the way. It’s not. If you’re using one room for a general catch-all, stage it as a living space instead. You can decorate it to look like an office, playroom, guest room to make it more appealing to potential buyers.

After all, nobody really wants to buy a house with a spare junk room, even if they end up using it that way themselves. Renting an actual storage space outside your home while you’re selling your house could be one of the best decisions you make during this process.

4. Go for Neutral but Modern

Almost 45% of home buyers say viewing a home with their own taste in décor leaves them with a positive feeling. Keeping the colors neutral yet modern is the best approach to spark interest in the widest range of buyers. Current trends tend towards lighter colors, and brighter spaces.

It’s not hard to understand that old-fashioned dark wood covered with doilies and surrounded by garish flowered wallpaper, like your grandmother used to favor, isn’t what’s going to sell best today. Neither will your bold decorating choices. A pop of color here and there is fine, but make sure you stay with the same color family in each room and avoid anything too busy or distracting.

5. Don’t Forget the Exterior

Your interior decorating choices aren’t the only ones that have an impact on your staging efforts. First impressions are probably the most crucial, and that means sprucing up your curb appeal. In fact, an attractive exterior means people often forgive a bit of mess on the interior.

Luckily, this is one of the easiest aspects of staging your home. Pull the weeds from your desert landscaping, clean the windows, power wash the driveway, and replace the broken door hinge or burned out exterior light. You can even throw a fresh coat of paint on the door or windowsills.

Conclusion

Staging your house is absolutely one of the best things you can do if you want it to sell faster, at a higher price. Even just doing a few of these tips will be extremely helpful.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can hire a professional for about $500 per room. Or, you can choose a listing agent who will do it for you as part of being your Realtor, like Dulcie Crawford does.

Dulcie Crawford is a native of Las Vegas with over 23 years of local real estate expertise. She understands the city and its trends and opportunities more than anyone, including how the economy responds to social events. She can explain clearly and simply how interest rates and inflation change, and what that means for you as a home buyer or seller trying to reach your real estate goals.

To find out more about working with Dulcie and her award-winning team, or to get more information about the current housing market conditions, properties featured on this blog, or our Hot Market Listings, please contact Dulcie Crawford directly at (702) 505-2775.