Home staging is the art of styling a home to appeal to the highest amount of potential buyers. Through tactical layout design, targeted mix of colors, textures, use of scale and lighting, homes are transformed to create a mood that resonates with buyers as soon as they step through the door. Staging brings out the charm of a home and accentuates it’s best features, making the home feel larger, cozier, and personable. The process enhances the overall aesthetic of the home in order to make enticing to potential buyers.
One of the biggest benefits of home staging is that you can turn a sale around that was not really moving on the market. It’s likely a potential homebuyer’s first look at your residence is done online making professional photography and a cohesive aesthetic throughout the home more important than ever before.
What Are The Benefits of Staging a Home for Sale?
Staging your home provides many benefits when trying to sell on the open market. Your home will stand out from the competition and sell faster.
Your Home Will Show Better
Giving your home the appearance of a blank slate is much better than one that has personal belongings in it. Potential buyers want to see a home that they can envision their own personal effects in. Having a home that is clean, decluttered, open and staged creates the environment that buyers seek.
Your Online Listing Will Stand Out
Quadra’s designers know how to style a home that will appeal to a larger number of people. Our designers do extensive research on the demographic of the area creating a personas of potential buyers. This helps us choose the right pieces and layouts for each project. Ultimately, the property will stand out because it shows how the space can be used to its greatest potential without too much effort or imagination on the behalf of the buyer.
Professional Spatial Planning
Not all homes are architecturally designed to function seamlessly with our everyday lives. Clever spatial planning utilizes a home’s existing features in new and beautiful ways to elevate a house to a home.
If your home is in an area that is catering toward young professionals, they might swap out your formal dining room for a home office space or spiff up your mudroom to an organized utility area.
There are many examples of how a professional stager can redesign your space with furniture and accents to give the new buyer ideas on how they could use different rooms of a home. A simple example could be something like rearranging the furniture in your living room in a symmetrical fashion. You can pull your furniture away from the walls to create a conversation area that is more inviting for instance.
How To Stage a House
Now that you understand the importance of staging your home, how exactly do you get started? What are the steps you should take to ensure that you have a successful staging?
These are questions that home staging professionals should be able to answer. Good home staging companies will know how to cater to all of these concerns you may have and provide you with a blueprint for success.
Declutter/ Store Your Items in the Interim
This is an important step when deciding to sell your home, and it cannot be over-emphasized. Your home needs to be clean. It needs to be decluttered. It needs to be open. Some steps you could take to declutter are donating clothes you do not wear, give one household item away a day, or something creative like the 12-12-12 challenge. This could be a fun way to declutter your house by finding 12 items to throw away, 12 to return to their proper place and 12 to donate.
A home that is dirty, cluttered and has an appearance of confined spaces is immediately devalued. You must clean thoroughly. It is imperative that you clear out your house. Putting all of your big ticket belongings into storage for the time being is a must. The benefits of doing so are that you have less to organize, less to clean, and overall a stress free home environment.
How to Stage a House While Living in It
Staging your home may be difficult while you are living in it. However, living in your home day-to-day and staging simultaneously can still be achieved. If you want the best value for your home, you have to go through the staging process while you are still occupying the home.
Staged vs Unstaged
Buyers view a home differently if it is empty, or if it has current occupants in it as opposed to if it is staged properly. The impact of staging is that it can have positive effects on the buyer’s experience.
Staged Homes
Staging the house is the most effective method to selling your home quickly and for the highest price possible. 96% of buyer’s agents say that the staging has an affect on their view of the home. Not only can staging your home impact the visual of your property, it can actually drive the value of your home up. To put this into perspective, The National Association of Realtors estimates that for every $100 that is invested into staging, the potential return is $400.
Vacant Homes
Empty houses take longer to sell than homes that are occupied, staged or furnished. Vacant houses stay on the market longer and sell for less than occupied houses. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case. Rooms appear smaller when they are empty. Any flaws that the rooms in the home have become more apparent when there is no furniture in the house. Also, buyers think you are in a rush to sell, which may drive the price down or let them think they can low ball you.
Furnished Homes
There are times when a client’s existing furniture may detract from a home’s best features. Is the furniture dark and bulky, making the space feel cramped? Are there items or heavy drapery blocking natural light? Sometimes the pieces might be right but not configured in a way that best suits the flow and function of the space. Solving these common mistakes takes a keen design eye and can make all the difference come listing day.
Conclusion: Staging With Quadra
Deciding to move is a large life event that requires rigorous preparation. Getting your home ready to be sold is a big process in itself. You may be worried about how to prepare your home to be sold. Do not stress as there are professional services that can provide you with peace of mind. If you do not know where to start, contacting a professional service would be an ideal starting place to help ease the burden.
Quadra’s team is always here to help. We offer free consultations and are more than happy to discuss the advantages of staging with clients. Some of the benefits of working with us is our in-house design team, our large inventory of furniture, custom artwork, and décor. We also have our own logistic team and movers who handle the entire move, repairs, and cleaning for you. We also have the ability to stage their home quickly and efficiently. Contact us to get started!