home staging Archives - Title First Agency

How To Stage Your Home for Sale

A well-staged home can make people feel comfortable and at home, which is likely to increase the sale price.

Staging your home well allows buyers to see themselves in that space, which can help them become attached to it. This makes it harder to walk away without feeling a loss. The more attached to the space they feel, the more likely they are to make an offer.

Clean and Open Up the Space

Before showing off your space, take time to clean and declutter. This includes putting away unnecessary furniture, throw blankets and pillows. If you have too much stuff, put some of it in storage. Make the space minimal, and then add a few touches to make it feel like someone’s home. The space should look livable, but not lived-in.

Don’t Make It Too Personal

When inviting people into your home, it can be tempting to show off your style. This is your space, and chances are you have worked hard to make it comfortable and appealing to you and your friends and loved ones.

Remember, you want to appeal to as many buyers as possible. More interest from buyers means more bidding, and that usually means a higher sale price.

If you want to appeal to more potential buyers, it’s better to play it safe with décor. Consider putting away personal and unnecessary knick-knacks. Think clean lines and safe colors. If you decorate with books or art, try to keep the selections relatively neutral.

Consider Hiring a Professional

While staging on your own can keep costs down in the short term, hiring a professional may be worth the cost when the home sells. We tend to become attached to our spaces and design choices. An outside party who has worked with a wide variety of audiences as a professional will have an eye trained for mass appeal. Hiring a designer may even pay for itself if it increases the sale price.

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Stage to Sell Your Home Fast

Prospective home buyers never like walking into an empty house where they can’t imagine themselves living. There should always be furniture and accessories to make the house, feel like a home. Hiring a professional Stager can help lessen the time a home is on the market as well as boost the offered price. A good stager will create an environment that will help the buyer feel the “at home” feeling and never even consciously know exactly why! Your Realtor should have access to a good photographer once your home is staged. During this pandemic, many people are shopping online for everything, including homes. Show off your newly staged home by having many pictures.

It’s always hard on the sellers. They have loved their home and don’t see what a “stranger” can see in their home. Buyers like everything “spelled out” for them and may not be able to see that the dining room is really a family room. Or windows with different treatments may make the room look brighter and bigger. Rearranging furniture to balance and maximize a sense of space in rooms is key to the staging process. Too big a cozy couch that the seller loves could possibly dwarf the room it’s in. Sellers don’t often see that boxing up knick-knacks and family pictures can actually add more value to a room.

Many sellers are told to paint walls in classic ivory and beige color scheme. That’s fine, but putting a twist on that to stand out from other homes on the market is a great idea. This way, at the end of the day, after a buyer has looked at many homes, they can easily call it to mind. The overall goal is to make each room feel fresh and inviting and easy for buyers to envision themselves and their belongings in. Grey, a very light blue, pale serene turquoise, charcoal, yellow – all accented with white are always pleasing. A skilled Stager will put a seller on the right path.

The Bottom Line: The seller’s goal is to have the house that potential buyers remember. The home that makes they can feel and see themselves living in. Open all the doors. Get rid of old window treatments. Rip up carpeting. Take down and box family photos. Fake plants, fake food, and blow-up mattresses are a turn-off. Buyers open closets and cabinets! Remember to make sure they are organized and clean.

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How to Stage Your Home Like a Pro When Selling

When you stage a home, you’re trying to show it in its best light. It should be styled in a way that highlights its best assets while downplaying its faults. Professionals real estate agents understand this, and that’s why they go to great lengths to ensure that any home on the market is immaculately clean and equipped with fresh, attractive furnishings. But if you’re selling your own home, you’ll face a unique set of challenges.

Unlike real estate companies that have robust communication streams and many hands on-deck, you’re likely trying to keep in touch with potential buyers while juggling your own job and personal responsibilities. Luckily, staging your home doesn’t take much more than a bit of foresight and some elbow grease. Read on for our best tips on staging your home like the pros when it comes time to sell.

Do a deep clean

Doing a thorough cleaning of all the living spaces is one of the most important steps when it comes to staging your home. Nobody wants to live in somebody else’s mess, and every imperfection that a potential buyer notices deducts from their estimated value of the home.

So you’ll want to clean every corner of your home. Make sure the floors are vacuumed, the windows are polished, and any dust or dirt is gotten rid of.

When cleaning, pay special attention to the kitchen and bathrooms. The kitchen appliances and countertops should be sparkling clean, free of any grease or food matter. In the bathroom, the toilet and shower should be so clean that they basically look unused. The room should be spotless, all the way down to the grout.

Take care of clutter

Too much clutter can make a space look small and crowded. And it doesn’t just encroach on the space, it also forces your own style and personality upon potential buyers, whose sensibilities may be entirely different from your own.

Therefore, you should store away all the unnecessary items and trinkets you would usually have around the house and just keep the essentials. Don’t stuff all your clutter into an empty closet either—visitors are going to want to look over every part of the house, and when they open up a closet to see shelves full of random items it’ll have a negative impact on how they perceive the closet space. If you don’t already have a new place where you can store your excess stuff, then consider renting a temporary storage unit.

Clear out personal items

While the family pictures on the mantle might make you feel at home, they won’t have the same effect on the strangers who are visiting your house. In staging your house, you should make an effort to depersonalize it.

Remove family pictures, personal items, and anything else that makes the house uniquely yours. By doing this, you’ll provide visitors with something of a blank slate, and potential buyers will be able to envision the space as their own home rather than feeling like they’re taking a tour of someone else’s.

Keep pets away

Even though dogs and cats are beloved by so many, it’s unlikely that potential buyers will find them appealing. Instead, they’ll probably be more focused on the stains and smells left behind by a pet. This is why you should remove any signs of your pet from the house. Clean up fur, treat lingering stains, and put things like food bowls, toys, and pet food in storage.

Make visitors feel at home

While you do want to clean up the house and remove your personal effects, you shouldn’t make the space completely sterile. Potential buyers want to feel like they’re in an idealized version of what the house could be, so cater to that idea by creating a warm and inviting atmosphere for visitors.

There are many ways to go about achieving this. You could offer freshly baked cookies at the door or put out a healthy smoothie for guests to enjoy. You might also pick up some fresh flowers and put them in a vase or set the dinner table to make the space feel even more homely.

Turn up the lighting

One of the first things visitors will notice when walking into your home is the lighting, so make sure your house is well-lit. Clean windows and open curtains around the house to let natural light inside. This is an important step, as the amount of natural light a home gets is a major consideration for many potential buyers.

Also, switch on the lights in the home and bring in supplemental lighting anywhere that needs it. Purchase bright new light bulbs to replace any of the existing ones that are weak or burnt-out.

Apply a fresh coat of paint

Clean up the walls of your house for visitors by removing any previous wallpaper and applying a fresh coat of paint. It’s a simple task that can completely transform the room and make it look new again.

When choosing the paint color, opt for neutral shades rather than bolder ones. After all, you want to cast a wide net and bright, bold colors on the walls might not appeal to everyone. So stick with warm neutral shades that add to the welcoming atmosphere you’re attempting to build.

Optimize the exterior

Curb appeal is extremely important when you’re trying to sell your home. Potential buyers most likely won’t even walk in the house if they’re put off by its exterior. This means you have to ensure that the facade of your home and the yard, if you have one, are in great shape.

Trim the hedges, cut the grass, and remove any unsightly weeds from the yard. If the paint on the outside of your home is peeling, consider giving it a touch up or, if that’s too much work, power wash it to remove dirt and grime. Also give the outside of the windows a good washing to make them sparkle.

In addition to making all the existing parts of the exterior look nice, you might even introduce new items that improve the look of your home, such as freshly planted flowers or patio furniture.

By properly staging your home, you can make it sell faster at a higher price. Every bit of time and work you put into the staging will likely pay dividends in the end. So be sure to go the extra mile in trying to turn your old house into a stranger’s dream home.

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Selling Your Home? Create an Inviting Space

Smart Design Choices to Make the Most of Your Space
No matter what size your living space is, there are a lot of smart design choices to help you make the most of it. You could be living in a small space by choice or necessity, but either way, there’s no need to put up with miniature things and clutter everywhere. Here are some essential tips to transform your home from a claustrophobic area to a fun, comfortable, and functional living space.

Prioritize Organization
The first thing you need to do is get organized. If you’re not one of the lucky people who seem to be born with exceptional organizational skills, then it’s time to learn this skill. Take time to go through your house and plan how you can make the most of your space. Make notes of where you can creatively organize your space. For instance, you might be able to install open shelves in your kitchen for more space, or you could loft your bed in order to add more floor space.

Streamline Everything
When you live in a small house or apartment, it’s essential to constantly evaluate your possessions so that you’re not keeping unnecessary things around. Whether it’s clothes you haven’t worn in years or receipts for stuff you’ve already broken or lost, it’s vital to minimize the clutter as much as you can. In much the same way as learning to get organized, you can also pick up some storage tips that will help you to increase the amount of free space you have. If you can, try to rent a small storage unit where you can house items that you don’t use regularly, but you’d still like to keep, such as holiday decorations, camping/fishing gear, beach umbrellas, and other seasonal belongings.

Leverage Color
Using color to your advantage is something that can totally transform your living space. Painting your home is also one of the most affordable ways of changing its look and feel. You can choose lighter hues for the walls to create an airy effect and make your indoor space feel a lot bigger. When it comes to creating the illusion of space and depth, neutral colors are the best choice. You’ll be able to expand the room with just a coat of paint. You can then add a bit of color and texture to create interest. However, try to stay away from large prints and particularly loud patterns as these tend to dwarf your space, making it feel smaller.

The Bottom Line
When you want to sell your home, there are many other tips and tricks to help you transform any room in your home and make space feel and look a lot bigger than it actually is. Other smart design options include using furnishings that work to visually expand the room, such as low-profile seating to create an illusion of high ceilings. You can also pick furniture that does double duty, such as having a
trunk/coffee table, or a coffee table/fish tank. The sky’s the limit, but you can get started right now by using the three tips outlined above to add more space and depth to so you can make the most of the space in each room.

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Skilled Staging and Selling Homes

unwrapping a package

It’s always hard on the sellers. They have loved their home and don’t see what a “stranger” in their home sees. Buyers like everything “spelled out” for them and may not be able to see that the dining room is really a family room. Or windows with different treatments may make the room look brighter and bigger. Rearranging furniture to balance and maximize a sense of space in rooms is key to the staging process. Too big a cozy couch that the seller loves could possibly dwarf the room it’s in. Sellers don’t often see that boxing up knick-knacks and family pictures can actually add more value to a room.

Many sellers are told to paint walls in a classic ivory and beige color scheme. That’s fine, but putting a twist on that to stand out from other homes on the market is a great idea. This way, at the end of the day, after a buyer has looked at many homes, they can easily call it to mind. The overall goal is to make each room feel fresh and inviting and easy for buyers to envision themselves and their belongings in. Grey, a very light blue, pale serene turquoise, charcoal, yellow – all accented with white are always pleasing. A skilled Stager will put a seller on the right path.

The Bottom Line: The seller’s goal is to have the house that potential buyers remember. The home that makes they can feel and see themselves living in. Open all the doors. Get rid of old window treatments. Rip up carpeting. Take down and box family photos. Fake plants, fake food and blow up mattresses are a turn-off. Buyers open closets and cabinets! Remember to make sure they are organized and clean.

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