If you want to get the most money possible when selling your home, you need to consider staging. A home stager give suggestions to prepare and style a home so that it will appeal to the majority of buyers, helping sell your home faster and for money. Staging can range from removing clutter and re-arranging furniture to adding accessories and even renting furniture and decorations.

De-Clutter and De-Personalize:
Should it Stay or Should it Go?

If you're selling, you're going to be moving, so you might as well get a head start on packing and put away everything that can distract a potential buyer when they're viewing your home. Deciding what to pack away, and what to display can be tough. The goal is to create enough of a blank palette to allow buyers to envision themselves living in the home. You don't want to go too far though, or you'll create a blank, sterile space that feels cold. When deciding what to pack away, and what to keep out, ask yourself these questions.

  1. Will it distract buyers from your home?
  2. Could it offend buyers in any way?

In other words, pack up and put away:

  • religious/spiritual accessories and artwork
  • items portraying nudity or controversial topics
  • collage-style frames filled with photos of people
  • excess family photos (5-7 nicely framed photos throughout the home are ok)
  • drug paraphernalia
  • prescriptions
  • personal mail
  • confidential paperwork
  • trophies/medals
  • collector's items
  • greeting cards
  • flags
  • animal hides/taxidermy
  • empty alcohol bottles
  • CDs, DVDs, games etc

Make sure you don't fill your closets, garage and other storage spaces with the boxes of stuff you pack up, it will give the impression that there is not enough storage space. Try renting a storage unit or PODs or a friend's house... just don't fill up all your storage spaces in the house.

Overall the goal is the make it easy for buyers to clearly see and remember the architectural features of the home, instead of getting focused on who owns the home.

Cleaning

You thought you were done after de-cluttering? Not quite... You need to give your home an extremely thorough "once-over" or detailing. An immaculately clean property shows pride of ownership, and tells the buyer, immediately, that the seller has probably taken great care of the property. Your real estate agent can recommend cleaning companies that will clean your house from top to bottom, and get it into showing shape.

Re-arranging Furniture 

A stager will analyze traffic-flow through the home, and floor-space throughout; are there areas that are tough to move through because of the placement or amount of furnishings? Are important features such as windows and fireplaces blocked or difficult to access? The goal is to allow buyers to see the entire space, all the features and picture themselves living there. Most importantly, you want all of the rooms to look as spacious as possible. Also, the rooms should be set up in the "best use" for the room; if you've converted a bedroom to a craft room, it will show best as a bedroom, if the most likely buyer for your home is a family with children. 

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