A well-staged home often sells in half the time that a non-staged home takes to sell. Many people don’t think they know how to stage their home, so they hire an expensive home-staging service to do it for them.
But you can do it yourself, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. So let’s take a look at 5 beginner (and inexpensive) home staging tricks that will help sell your home in DMV faster.
5 Beginner Home Staging Tricks That Will Help Sell Your Home In DMV Faster
1. Replace Personal/Family Pictures with Artwork
Most of the home staging tricks that will help sell your home have as a primary goal (or at least secondary) encouraging potential buyers to envision your home as a place they can easily make into their home. All you have to do is remove whatever stamps it with your personality and your tastes.
Begin by removing family mementos and portraits and replacing them with, say, canvas artworks. Reproductions of paintings of floral motifs and landscapes are fairly inexpensive and will show up well in listing photos.
2. Don’t Leave an Empty Living Room
Although you might think that leaving the living room empty would help buyers picture their own belongings in it, it doesn’t actually work that way. An empty living room provides no point of reference for buyers to get an idea of whether their own furniture will fit.
You can’t, however, just shove some furniture into the room and let it go at that: it takes some careful and judicious arranging – staging. Because people generally scan a room from left to right on entry, you should place the tallest piece in the far-left (from the entry) corner, which will make the room seem larger.
3. Don’t Neglect the Bathroom
When it comes to staging, most people put a lot of effort into the larger living areas and bedrooms. But they often neglect the bathroom(s).
Be sure to put away all the scattered toiletries and replace the gaudy shower curtain and mismatched towels. A nice touch is to dress up the bathroom with fresh, all-white linens and white bath mats and shower curtains. The idea is to give it a spa-like look and feel.
4. Use Decorative Vignette
Of all the home staging tricks that will help sell your home, this one may have the most impact. And it’s easy and inexpensive.
Decorative vignettes, or displays, can add a cozy, lived-in feel and atmosphere – without having your personality fingerprints included. These vignettes/displays can include baskets, plants, vases, lanterns, and books situated on counters, dressers, and bookshelves. The general advice here is to keep colors close and to group the items in odd numbers and with varying heights and shapes.
5. Paint Rooms in Neutral Tones
You don’t have to paint your whole house, but painting the walls in the rooms with “interesting” colors is not a good idea. The object, again, is to achieve that blank-canvas effect to allow buyers to envision the rooms as theirs with their belongings in them.
Staging experts suggest repainting with neutral tones and hues for the essential blank-canvas look of optimal staging. If you use Benjamin Moore paints, the recommended colors are Shaker Beige, Linen White, Jackson Tan, and Mellow Yellow. For other brands, you can have your local paint store do a color match.
So try these 5 home staging tricks that will help sell your home. It doesn’t cost all that much, and it’s definitely worth the effort. And there’s, even more, you can do to get a better offer and expedite the sale.