What is home staging, besides an essential part of preparing a property for a sale? Home staging might seem like a very simple part of the process. It involves setting your home up to look attractive to potential buyers, entice them inside, and then impress them once they’ve crossed the threshold. Yet though it may seem like it involves nothing more than making sure your home is clean and presentable, there is a lot more to effective home staging than you might expect. Indeed, it could even be thought of as something of an exact science.
If you sell your home through a professional real estate brokerage, such as City Home Collective out of Salt Lake City, Utah for example, then a professional realtor can certainly advise on how best to go about staging your home for a sale. In fact, a degree of expertise is certainly needed here as there are many things – some not obvious to those outside of the industry – that can adversely affect your home’s ability to attract buyers. Remember, proper home staging is all about creating the right first impression. Here then are the main areas of home staging:
Curb Appeal
Perhaps more important than the interior of your home is its curb appeal. This is not because buyers universally consider the exterior more important (far from it, it’s the interior they will actually be living in) but instead because this is always the first any buyer will see of your property. This can be when viewing the house from just outside (hence the term “curb” appeal) or through listing photographs online (see below), which will normally feature the outside of the home as the top photograph. It is also a home’s curb appeal that will first alert a buyer to any problems with the property. If your roof looks shabby, for example, then this will suggest expensive repairs to a buyer (even if the roof is working order) and put them off before they have even stepped inside.
Interior Design
The second part of proper home staging is to successfully represent the interior of the home in an attractive way. It is important to note here that this is not the same thing as presenting the home as you would to visitors. While potential buyers may be impressed by certain personal touches, it is the functionality of the essentials – the bathroom fittings, the windows, the hall space, etc. – that they will most be interested in. Therefore, staging the interior of your home means deliberately drawing attention to these aspects, and not distracting the buyer with your personal home furnishings.
Listings Photographs
Properly selling your home to potential buyers involves work both in front of and behind the camera. If you have succeeded in maximizing your home’s curb appeal and getting the interior design just right, you still need to provide some photographs that convey all of this to a buying public that will almost always see those photographs before they ever visit your home. In practice, this means paying attention to important tips, such as always shooting from the corner of the room in order to get as much in as possible and give an impression of space. It also means making sure the photographs look professional and will not look out of place in a real estate brokerage’s window or an online property listings site.
In many cases, there’s no substitute for the advice of a professional when it comes to getting staging just right. But if you keep these three most important areas in mind, then you can at least be sure of covering all the bases ahead of any sale.