Selling your home as quickly as possible at the highest price (preferably in a cash offer) is every home seller’s dream. Thankfully, there are a lot of simple things you can do to get your home ready to sell that can help you accomplish these goals. Here are five tips from us at Amare Real Estate Services in Morgan Hill, CA about how to properly stage a home and get more money from the sale.
Home staging is a way of presenting your home in the best possible light by a pleasing arrangement of furnishings, decorations, and accessories to help potential buyers develop an emotional attachment and desire to buy your home.
Proper staging makes your home appear to be more spacious, more valuable, and more desirable. When homes are staged well, many realtors agree that sellers often sell their homes more quickly and are more likely to get higher offers (1-10% higher) than they would if the home were not staged.
If you are interested in pricing your home to get top dollar when you sell, staging may be one of the best ways to find the highest offers.
We’d like to share our 5 favorite tips for home staging so you can sell your home quickly to prospective buyers:
1. Make the Clean Scene: Want to sell your home fast? It’s got to be clean. Some people can look past grime, dirt, dust, and stains to see that hidden potential in a home. But most people can’t. Make it easy for people to enjoy being in your home by doing a thorough spring cleaning in every room in the house and outside, as well.
2. Cut the Clutter: When you are staging a home to sell quickly, it’s critical to declutter. Most people live with some degree of clutter in their homes on a daily basis. But when people want to buy a new place, clutter is distracting, and even worse than that, it is off-putting.
Clutter makes a place feel smaller, junkier, and less valuable than it really is. It makes it hard for people to emotionally bond with a place.
So, box up (and put in storage away from your house) anything you don’t absolutely need while you are marketing your home. This is a great time to throw away things you won’t need anymore and give away quality items that are no longer useful to you. Then you’ll have less to store and less stuff to move into your new place.
3. Shift into Neutral: Potential buyers don’t want to see a home that belongs to you. They want to dream about a home that belongs to them. Things like family photos, religious paraphernalia, team merchandise, and other personal items make buyers feel like they are in your space. Take down paintings or portraits that scream your personality and replace them with a few neutral, broadly appealing decorations. When you are trying to sell your home, make it as easy as possible for people to picture living there, themselves. Help them to fantasize about the potential for them to love your home.
4. Light Up Your Life: Photographers know that great lighting makes a huge difference in how appealing a space looks. If you want to sell a home fast, staging a house should involve using all the possible lighting at your disposal.
Natural Lighting: Open all the blinds and curtains when you show your home and when you have professional pictures made. Let natural light bathe your home, letting in all the mood-enhancing sunlight.
Artificial Lighting: This is also a great time to get rid of old, broken, or dated light fixtures. Replace them with something modern-looking that complements your home.
Increase your bulb wattage with LED light bulbs so that rooms and closets are well-lit. Burned-out bulbs and dark spaces are not attractive. Add lamps and accent lights to brighten up your space and be sure all the lights are on when you show your home.
5. Focus on Important Rooms: Some aspects of staging your home apply to all rooms: cleaning, lighting, and making sure there is no remotely offensive odor. But every room doesn’t need the same level of attention as other aspects of staging. As far as arranging the furniture, depersonalizing, and adding appealing decor, just a few rooms need the most attention if you want to really wow buyers.
The most important rooms in your home to stage when selling your house include the kitchen, master bedroom, living room, and dining room.
About Amare Real Estate Services
Serving the East Bay, South Bay, and parts of the Central Valley, Amare’s highly-skilled and experienced team at Amare is poised and prepared to perform at a high level for all of its clients. Over-the-top customer service, full transparency, and complete accountability are the foundation that Amare is built upon. Victoria Attanasio created a company based on a simple and caring yet strategic approach—if you follow through and do what you say, people will flock to you.