Preparing For a Sale – Staging a Home to Sell
Staging a home for a sale is as important as being priced ahead of the market. Staging is the art of preparing the house for sale. Staging is what you do after you’ve cleaned, uncluttered, painted, made minor repairs; it’s all about dressing the house for sale. Staging makes your house look bigger, brighter, cleaner, warmer, more habitable and, best of all; it makes home buyers want to buy it!
The staging process starts when you search for a qualified listing agent by asking the questions regarding staging and preparing your home for sale. Some Real Estate Sales Professionals are had earned an ASP RE Certification which is an Accredited Staging Professional for Realtors designation. Other Real Estate Professionals will have a certified ASP Staging Professional on retainer or on staff.
How to Best Prepare Your Home For Sale
Everybody reads articles about preparing a home for sale. I think there’s a problem with those articles. Most people don’t really see what they have. Get someone to come into your home, such as a good friend or close relative, who you think will be honest and straightforward and who you think has a good handle on the real estate presentation world. Tell them to be brutally honest about what should be put away, thrown away, given away or stored.
Most owners love what they’ve done to their homes. And they’re color blind too. So if they’re told to depersonalize, reduce clutter or whatever the advice that is coming their way, they ignore it, unless they’re that rare individual who can take off those rose colored glasses and really “see” their home as others will.
3 Things You Really Do Not Want Buyers to Know About You
Yes, we all have secrets, some we can afford to make public, but some others should be kept under wraps. When selling your property you should ensure that none of your personal and private items are left out for prospective buyers to view.
Sure, your stager would have advised or helped you to depersonalize your space; but somehow the day to day items that you use or newly received are left in areas that prying eyes can view.
1. Rumour has it that very many normal people peek into medicine cabinets. Do you really want the prescription medication or medical equipment that you or your family use to be viewed by complete strangers? Those items could send the wrong message to the buyer.
Should You Consider Home Staging Certification?
There are many successful home stagers that are not certified and do quite well. Typically, they have been professionally staging homes for a while and have developed a list of realty clientele who utilize their services on a regular basis. If you are fortunate to be amongst this group of professional home stagers, then obtaining certification is probably not on the top of your priority list. However, if you are fairly new to the home staging business, just starting out or haven’t been able to develop a large customer base, professional certification may be something you should consider.
Obtaining certification credentials will identify you as a professional, a master of your trade with the expertise to get the job done. Realtors look to home stagers as a way to boost their showings to sales conversions. If a realtor has never used a home staging service before, presenting as a certified specialist in the area will gain you additional credibility. Just as home inspectors have become the trusted standard to use in evaluating the worthiness of the purchase price; accredited home staging professionals are becoming the standard that realtors look to for moving homes on the market.
Steps on How to Stage Your Home For a Quick Sale
The real estate market is the slowest it has been in many years. One of the reasons is that many homeowners do not know how to get their homes ready to sell. A new facet of real estate is the home staging of a property for sale. A home stager assists the La Mesa real estate agent to get the home ready to be the most appealing to a broad spectrum of buyers and to showcase the best features of a home. This will help the home seller sell their home quickly and for the highest price. This article will guide you through the various steps you can do to stage your home yourself and get your home ready to sell by an El Cajon real estate agent.
Step One: De-personalize
This is the first important step to stage your home. When a prospective buyer enters your home they want to try to see themselves possibly living there and not evidence of your current family living there. One way to do this is to remove all family photos. Many people like to look at photos displayed in the room and by doing so, they forget to look at the room itself. When thinking back of your property, they may not remember your property well enough to want to buy it but they may remember what your family photos looked like.
15 Action Steps You Need to Take Before Listing Your Home For Sale
Selling your home is one of the most life-changing decisions you can make. Having made the decision you will need to meticulously prepare for the transfer by taking steps to ensure that your property is sale ready and that you are aware of the intricacies involved in the process.
These 15 Action Steps will help you to prepare your home and yourself:
1. Find your legal papers, such as the deed, insurance, mortgage documents, etc.
2. Call a title company and ask for a complementary title report to check for discrepancies that may be present.
3. Check your credit rating.
4. Speak to your bank about pre-approval whether you need a mortgage or not.
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Successful Home Staging Props Using Magazines
Would you believe it if I told you that I actually had over 50 different subscriptions to various magazines at one point? My poor mail person! I had subscriptions to every fashion, home, and design magazine you can think of. It was absolutely insane and out of control.
As you could guess I obviously couldn’t keep up with the subscriptions. I never had time to read them so finally one day, I made a list of every magazine I was receiving and started cancelling them as the subscriptions expired. I can proudly say I’m a recovering magazine subscriber and only have two active subscriptions.
So, what did I do with all these publications? I actually used a lot of them for staging. Some of the higher end ones like Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and San Francisco were used as coffee table displays or in offices, and Wine Spectator was sometimes used in the kitchen, dining or bar areas.
Colorful Kitchen Themes For Home Staging
There are many creative and colorful ways to use cookbooks right out of your own home library to stage your kitchen. I would like to show you how you can “kick it up a notch” and actually create a theme around the cookbook you choose. Let me illustrate and explain two examples for you to model.
As one kitchen example for the counter space you can display a pasta cookbook and carry the theme along with decorative oil bottles or a bottle of olive oil with a more traditional Italian packaging. You may also chose to include a pasta dish towel, and a pasta bowl filled with faux tomatoes, onions, garlic and dried pasta.
A more professional and polished look will use the pasta theme throughout the kitchen area. For the bar area you will need to set out bowls of tri-colored corkscrew pasta and add a faux red tomato in the center. These colors really pop against countertops. To refine this setting, I would add a colorful placemat under each bowl to complete the look.
Don't Reduce Your Price – Recreate Your Space
So you are trying to sell your home, but it just does not seem to be attracting any real interest from buyers; you have had a few prospective buyers walking though your doors; but, you have had no offers. There are hundreds of homeowners who know exactly what I’m talking about. Having your house sit on the market for many months will surely leave you wondering what you can do to get someone to sign on the dotted line.
Here are some of the questions you are probably asking yourself:
* Take it off the market for awhile?
* Lower your price?
* List with another broker?
* Fix it up, and then relist it at a higher price?
* Pay to fix it up and leave it at the same price?
The Art Of Preparing A Home For Sale
Real Estate Staging is the process of preparing a home for sale. Staging is really about un-decorating and removing years of living, collecting & decorating so a buyer can visualize themselves living in the home. When a seller “lets go” of some of their own things, it then gives permission for the buyer to buy! As a realtor, the preparation of a home for sale can be a difficult subject to approach with a seller. Some things are obvious such as warn, dirty carpeting that needs to be replaced. Or maybe there are minor repairs needed throughout the home. But sometimes a home is in good condition but needs a little “TLC” before that first showing.
Here are the top 5 things to tell your sellers.
1. YOU DON’T LIVE IN YOUR HOME THE SAME WAY YOU SELL YOUR HOME – Many of the items that you showcase for the home you live in may need to be eliminated when your home is being shown to potential buyers. This does not mean that those items are not beautiful or important. It just means that they may be a deterrent to a buyer.