How to Stage Your Home to Impress Potential Buyers
If you think that selling a home is easy, think again. You can’t just throw out a “For Sale” sign and wait for the offers to come pouring in. Instead, it’s necessary to get every aspect of your home ready for the onslaught of prospective buyers who may be coming in to check out your home.
As such, you need to think about “staging” your home as if it was a set piece for a play so that your visitors can see the charm and potential you know exists in your home. Here’s how you can do just that:
- Start out front — You’ve probably heard the term “curb appeal” and you cannot deny this is important. As soon as the potential buyers pull up to the house, you want them sold on why they should consider it. In order to do this, make sure that the lawn, plants, and flowers look immaculate. This means mowing regularly (and re-sodding if needed) and putting out new flowers in hanging baskets or flower beds. Also, clean the whole of the exterior, including windows and power wash the house’s walls and walkways. For a last touch, spruce up the front porch with some small lawn chairs for a sitting space and a new welcome mat to invite your visitors in.
- Clean your house top to bottom — Now is the time to do that spring cleaning you’ve been putting off. You need to make sure that everything from the ceilings to the baseboards looks neat and clean. That means wiping down the walls, vacuuming every square inch of the carpet and furniture, cleaning the bathroom grout and tile, and making sure that nothing is left looking dingy. Our best suggestion here is to hire a cleaning service if you are pressed for time and want to make it really dazzle.
- Clear out your personal stuff — Basically, when it comes to staging a house, you want to remove any clutter and items you keep lying around that have personal meaning to you. Rent a storage space and move out as much as possible. We aren’t saying to move out completely—keep everything you need to live while you sell the home. But personal pictures, knick-knacks, and mementos should go so that the visitors can picture themselves in this “ blank space” instead of you.
- Really clean the carpets — Now that you’ve vacuumed the carpets, take a close look and see if they need extra help. If this is the case, you should hire a professional carpet cleaning company to get rid of the accumulated grime and stains that will turn off prospective buyers.
- Set up the dining room — If you’re like most people, the dining room isn’t used that often except for holidays and parties. But now, you should set out place settings and make it look like you are ready for the arrival of guests for a dinner party. This will give that perfect look of inviting.
- Go seasonal — Make your home fit the season of the year. If you are selling your home in the fall, decorate with pumpkins or seasonal flowers. At Christmas, have the tree up with some small, tasteful decorations that will make them see this as their permanent home. Also, set up the backyard to look inviting with a fire pit in the fall and winter and a grill in the spring and summer.
Getting your house ready for potential buyers goes a lot further than just cleaning up. You need to do some serious overhauling on your home and decorate it to look perfect for its new owners. This way, you can hopefully beat out the competition and get your house to sell quickly.
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