The Importance of Home Staging When Selling
As of November 2021, the average time it took to make and close a home sale was a total of 71 days.
Selling a home can be a difficult and time-consuming task. There’s a range of factors that can affect how easy it is to sell your home, as well as how much money you’ll get for it. You may want to take certain steps to make the selling process easier.
Home staging is something you can do to make get your home sold quicker. Just know that it involves work, so you’ll need to decide if you want to do it based on the benefits that it offers.
For a rundown of what home staging is, and how it can help you sell, keep reading.
What Is Home Staging?
Home staging is a strategy that you can use to get higher offers for your home. It’s a process of setting your home up so that it’s better for showcasing to potential buyers.
It generally involves cleaning the home and arranging the furniture and decor in a way that will appeal to people. Doing this can be free, but you make want to take extra steps such as painting, landscaping, and adding things like furniture and plants.
Note that this isn’t the same as decorating. The idea is that you want to make the property look a certain way that specifically appeals to buyers. As such, it may involve removing things that are more specific to your family such as pictures or pet-related items. Neutral colors and generic appliances are ideal for this.
Benefits of Home Staging
Understanding the importance of home staging will help you understand why it can help you sell your home. It will make it appeal to buyers in a range of ways, which will lead to less time on the market, a higher overall value, and more offers.
Helps Buyers Vizualize Their Life in a Home
One of the main reasons to stage a home is to make it easier for people to visualize their own families in it during a viewing. When people walk into a room, it’s more likely to appeal to them if they can immediately see how they’ll use the space available.
This is why de-personalizing your home can be incredibly helpful. Having personal items on display will make buyers feel like they’re in someone else’s home when you want them to view it as theirs. If you have any unusual furniture or decor, you might also want to remove this and replace it with more neutral items.
Increases the Value of Your Home
When selling your home, you’ll want to get as much for it as you can. With that in mind, people will only make an offer that they think is fair based on what they’ve seen.
If you stage your home, it can make it more appealing to potential buyers, thereby increasing its value. Depending on how far you go with staging, it can cost upwards of $1,000. In most cases, however, staging will increase the value by more than the cost of the staging itself.
It’s not unrealistic for staging to raise the value of a home by 5%-10%. This might not sound like a lot, but 5% of $400,000 is $20,000, which is quite a significant amount of money.
Helps With Getting Better Photos
Your chances of getting a good price for your home are higher if you get more viewings. There are several ways you can do this, and one of the most effective is with good listings.
Most people start looking at potential homes online, and you can use listings to describe your home and upload a range of pictures. Having good pictures will go a long way to making people want to view your home.
When a home is staged well, pictures will naturally come out better. First impressions are crucial, so getting good photos will make a huge difference. It will also give people a better feel for the home before looking at it, so you’ll generally get more people who are already quite interested.
Your Home Will Spend Less Time on the Market
When you sell a home, having it on the market for a long time isn’t ideal. In a perfect scenario, you would be getting offers in just a few days, but unfortunately, things don’t always go that smoothly.
By staging your home, people will be more impressed when they view your property. This will encourage them to make an offer quickly. They won’t want to miss out on a good opportunity, and they’ll know that other people viewing the property will be thinking the same.
If people want to close quickly, you can get your home sold in a much shorter time. It’s also worth noting that when a home is on the market for too long, the price will drop, which you want to avoid.
Demonstrates the Potential of a Home
If you’ve lived in a home for a while, you might have experimented with furniture, decor, and other features to create a space that’s perfect for you. While you might enjoy this, people have different tastes, and it may put some buyers off.
Staging a home makes things simple. This allows people to easily visualize what changes they could make in the future. When they can get an image in their mind of the things they can do to make a home theirs, they’ll be more likely to make an offer.
If you have a room that you use as a gym, for example, this might not appeal to everyone. Through staging, you can change this into a guest bedroom. People can then see this as an ideal space for friends and family to stay, which is beneficial to almost anyone.
Makes a Space Feel Bigger
Size is a big factor when people are looking for a new home. Having more space presents more opportunities and can allow people to live more comfortably. Contrary to popular belief, a room can often look bigger with furniture in it than when it’s empty.
This is because it provides a sense of context. People can see what kinds of things will fit in a room, allowing them to get a better idea of how they can use the space.
In a bedroom without furniture, for example, it can be hard to visualize how much space will be left once a bed is placed there. If you’ve already got a bed in there, they can then see how much space it takes up so they can determine what else they could have in the room.
It also allows people to get a better idea of how comfortably the furniture they already have will fit. This can make them more confident in making an offer if they know they won’t need to replace everything.
Home Staging Tips
To stage your home before listing it, there’s a range of things you can do. Cleaning is one of the most crucial. This means tidying up any clutter and doing a deep clean inside and out. You can either hire someone to do this or you can do it yourself to save some money.
Making repairs can also be helpful. Small things like a leaky faucet or a loose door handle can make a sizable impact on people’s opinions of a home. Take care of small repair jobs to show that the house is well looked after and in good shape.
Improving the curb appeal will also make a significant difference. You can do things like trimming the lawn, adding plants, and touching up the paint on the outside of your home. You don’t want people to be put off before they even get inside.
If you’ve got personal items, unique features, and bold colors, you may want to get rid of these. Neutral colors and a plain feel can be ideal for staging, helping you get more offers.
Increasing the amount of light in your home can make it look more welcoming and pleasant. Open curtains and blinds to allow more natural light in. You can also replace any dull bulbs with brighter ones in rooms that don’t get a lot of natural light.
Selling Your Home
Home staging is one of the best ways you can make selling your home easier. With that in mind, it still takes time, effort, and (often) money. There are, however, ways you can sell your home much more easily.
We Buy Houses is an online platform where you can sell your home almost entirely online without the need for staging. Just enter your details and we can arrange a time to come and see your property. We’ll then be able to give you a cash offer without all the hassle that usually comes with selling a home.
To get started, click here to get your cash offer today.
