Are you ready to move on up and out in 2020? When it comes to getting a buyer fast, there is perhaps nothing more important than how you stage your home. Staging is all about strategically decorating and arranging your home in a way that makes it appealing to a potential buyer. You want people to be able to picture themselves in your property.
Some people will pay a professional staging company, but this will run you several thousand dollars sometimes. Why do that when you can take care of it yourself? Your efforts will usually pay off. In fact, you could see a purchase price that is between 1-5% higher just because of staging!
If you want to make your house look better to buyers, follow these staging tips.
1. Focus on the Kitchen, Master Bedroom, and Living Room
You won’t get a lot of bang for your buck in every room. Making over your pantry to look like the inside of a French chalet? It’s just not going to matter to most buyers. The rooms that will get you the most return for your efforts are the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom. These are the rooms the purchasing decision makers are going to spend most of their time.
Not only should you clean these rooms within an inch of their life, but you should arrange the furniture in a way that makes it look like it’s easy to socialize, entertain, and be comfortable. Add a cozy ottoman to a window seating area or a few more stools to the breakfast bar.
2. Patch and Repair the Walls
One of great liberties of owning a home is not having a landlord yell at you about putting holes in the wall. You can nail away! However, once you’re staging your property for resale, you need to patch up any imperfections and holes in the wall. They will distract buyers from the other wonderful qualities in the room.
Clean, repaired walls show you have taken care of your home. A potential buyer shouldn’t leave your home with a short list of all the annoying things they’ll have to do when they move in — like filling holes with caulk or covering some old Crayon marks near the floorboards.
3. Get Rid of Highly Personal Items
Buyers want to see your home as their own. That can be difficult when there are tons of family photos or highly specific artwork everywhere. As nice as it would be if people had huge imaginations about your home, the reality is that they don’t.
Among the things to put in storage include: family photos on your bookshelf, childrens’ paintings on the fridge, knick-knacks from your vacations, and your wall calendar. You can still inject some style and personality into the home, but they should be relatively neutral. Create a palette upon which your buyers can create their own interior design.
4. Think Light and Bright
Finally, while you love your blood red bathroom, other people may not. A white or tan wall is the best option (particularly in the big three rooms we mentioned earlier). Consider adding a fresh coat of paint to the biggest rooms. Not only does this make the spaces seem more refreshed and ready for move in, but light walls can make a room seem bigger. If you’re looking to make the home more inviting and appear as if there is more floor space — go with light curtains and new white walls.
If you’re not in a position to stage your home, you don’t have to. In fact, you don’t have to go through the MLS at all. If you have a leaky roof or bad plumbing — even the best staging tips can’t hide it. You might want to consider selling your home as-is to a company like California Family Homebuyers. We buy homes in all sorts of conditions, from properties with damage to homes that have been used as a rental property.
If you want to avoid the hassle of staging and doing repairs, give us a call today! We can assess your property and make you a fair offer that doesn’t require to you invest another dime into your home. Plus, we often close as quickly as a few weeks!