Our home staging guide will help you gain a better understanding of this important and huge subject!
Any real estate seller’s ambition is to sell fast and at the desired price. It is generally beneficial to give the home a makeover in order to attract the buyer’s eye and generate a «love at first sight” impression. Home staging is a real estate marketing tactic that will emphasize your property’s strengths and allow you to negotiate.
What Is Home Staging?
Home staging is the art of employing decoration, or rather the absence of it, to produce a pleasant impression that will differentiate various properties of equal worth on the market. The purpose of home staging is to employ simple, even basic, tactics to give the house you want to sell a fresh look.
Buying a home is the most binding act for most individuals after marriage. For some, this is a once-in-a-lifetime decision that signifies years of income… if the property viewed permits the buyer to project himself.
Most of the time, objective arguments prevail, and the property is studied from every angle to find the smallest flaws that may warrant negotiating a decrease in the advertised price. To entice the potential customer and maintain his expectations, it is wiser to put all of the odds on his side and make some concessions.
Remember that the photographs in the ad spark the buyer’s first impulse. With an eye-catching graphic, you can stand out from the crowd and entice the buyer to see your home. You’ll then have 90 seconds to persuade him, giving him enough time to visualize himself or not in your interior.
It is your responsibility to showcase the assets, volumes, and spaces upstream because the majority of real estate purchasers are unable to discern the potential of a property if they cannot project themselves.
Home staging is depersonalizing the home rather than beautifying it, leaving the future owner with the option to do so. Home staging does not affect the building’s structure, therefore it is not remodeling, even though some modest work can be done (painting, etc.).
What Is The Cost of Home Staging?
Some real estate companies, particularly those with exclusive mandates, include a house staging service in their sales mandates. Their goal, like yours, is to sell as soon as possible. Because house staging is not controlled in France and the prices are not regulated, determining the cost of this service is tricky. Several criteria must be considered:
- The property’s value
- The surface area
- The scope of the task
Professional home staging interventions range from 0.5 and 4% of the selling price. You may profit from a basic evaluation of your interior for a fixed charge of $200, followed by the delivery of a thorough report. It is up to you whether to make the suggested alterations or to hire a home stager for the day or half-day. A thorough house staging service typically costs 2% of the sale price.
A word of caution: stay away from any service provider that recommends a decorating project. Home staging merely serves to depersonalize and renew, whereas decorating seeks to personalize.
The Home Staging Guide
For these reasons, home staging makes sense not only from a cosmetic standpoint but also from a financial standpoint, by relying on pillars that are both common sense and successful methods that have shown their effectiveness:
Decluttering
The most basic aspect of home staging: decluttering your space!
The most crucial thing to remember whether selling your primary house or purchasing and selling as an investment is that the buyer must see the quantities.
De-cluttering your house helps you to make tiny rooms larger, which is what a buyer wants most of all: value for money, which in real estate means having space! However, de-cluttering is also about highlighting the strengths of your home: if your main room is vast but packed with dense, ancient, dark-colored furniture…
A big table, seats all over the area, multiple sofas, and knick-knacks everywhere will convey the sensation of narrowness. Not only will your space appear smaller, but it will also appear cluttered, disorganized, and difficult to read.
It’s a subconscious phenomenon, but the final result is that we don’t feel good or are uncomfortable.
Furthermore, your furniture and belongings reflect your own tastes, which are not always shared by everyone.
The goal here is not to discuss your preferences or disclose your personality, but to sell your house at the greatest possible price!
Reuse & Revamp
In addition to maintaining only the necessities mentioned in the preceding section, think about reusing your furniture, even if it means diverting it from its primary function.
Anesthetic boost can also be beneficial: if you have old quality cherry furniture with a design that is a touch too vintage for today’s tastes?
Consider repainting them with paints made specifically for furniture restoration and that stick well to ancient wooden furniture!
It’s amazing how a simple, well-placed paint job can transform an outdated piece of furniture into something intriguing and contemporary again!
Make your interior easier to read
Another fundamental aspect of house staging is to accentuate your interior’s legibility.
What exactly does this mean? It’s simple: when you go into a room, you must quickly grasp what it’s for and that the things in it are appropriate for the space.
An exercise bike does not belong in your living room, and neither does the kitchen table serve as a workspace for children and their many toys, crayons, and plush animals.
Is there a guest room available?
Then it should have a bed or a couch bed and a wardrobe, not boxes from the last relocation and extra ironing clothes!
Of course, customers are not fools and will recognize the potential with some effort; but, not everyone will want to make that effort, and many will be content with what they see.
When they return home and debrief the visit, it is preferable if they say to themselves, “there is an additional room,” rather than “the attic with the boxes,” which will only be appreciated as a storage space when it can be utilized as a room! And, certainly, house staging is also a form of psychological…
Remove large defects
Perhaps most importantly, if you’ve lived in your apartment or house for a time, you’re familiar with both its advantages and disadvantages.
Of course, some will be unrepairable or will necessitate too much labor, but if you know, for example, that your floor tiles are in poor condition and are no longer up to date, it’s now or never to invest in a floating floor that you can install yourself.
Isn’t the bottom of the garden like a rubbish dump? Clear it out! This will enable you to:
- Increase the value of the space
- Make the house more appealing and provide the impression of quality and neatness
- Relieve the future owners of the work and therefore make their decision simpler!
In summary, identify the two or three key flaws in your property and strive to remedy them, which might be as follows:
- A missing door
- Indications of dampness or peeling paint
- Dangling electrical plugs
- A worn-out and ineffective kitchen, with ancient carpeting on the walls and floor
Bring Comfort & Functionality
Last but not least, improve your everyday life and the lives of your prospective consumers by giving usefulness or comfort.
For example, and for the price of $20, it is possible to install a security camera on wifi with phone watching, which is always comforting for a couple with children.
It might also include constructing a lovely, welcoming, and functional center island between your kitchen and dining area.
Installing a huge floor-to-ceiling closet in a room is always popular with prospective purchasers since storage is a valuable commodity, and it only takes a few wooden boards, nails, and curtains to change a dull wall into a room with a spacious dressing room!
Do You Have to Be a Handyman to Do Home Staging in Your Apartment?
We’re not going to lie to ourselves, it definitely helps!
Being a handyman, whether to go farther or to cut costs, is obviously beneficial when it comes to house staging.
We’d rather talk about the willingness to learn now, rather than pure talents, because we don’t go to redo a roof or alter the windows in house staging.
Even if you have no expertise, you can paint a wall, assemble a piece of furniture, or screw wood boards together.
The main thing is to get started; you’ll discover that it’s lot easier than it appears and that the results are frequently satisfying!
Furthermore, there are several home staging concepts that do not necessitate you becoming a handyman.
De-cluttering or assigning a specific and distinct role to each area, for example, is merely interior design.
However, if you do not feel up to the work or are unsure where to begin, consulting an expert, such as an interior decorator, may be really beneficial.
Final Thoughts
Our excellent home staging guide has come to an end: I hope you will have a better understanding of this huge and intriguing subject!
We also hope that you have grasped the importance and possibilities of home staging.
- Is it possible to sell anything by setting your home? No
- Can house staging help us sell for a higher price? In some cases.
- Does home staging ever improve the value of my home? Absolutely!
We attempted to construct some guidelines that should provide you with some suggestions and pointers to assist you succeed with your sale.
