Three Big Reasons to Stage Your Home Before You Sell
You can do absolutely nothing to your home and still sell it for big bucks, but there is one huge caveat – it needs to be in a prime location. The only time when you’ll get the maximum amount you’d want to sell the property for (or even beyond) is when it’s your sole property holding up a development proposal. Other than that, however, you will almost always get a bonus for staging and doing up your home in advance. People don’t want to see clutter or a mess. They don’t even really want to see your furniture. While not everyone can afford to outright stage their property with rented everything from furniture to décor, cleaning it up, removing personal items, and even making a few key repairs so that it looks better inside and out can give you these three key benefits:
• Greater Interest
One of the biggest and most important reasons for staging your home is to make it irresistible. Staging can help sell a property, and the why boils down to marketing. People today will largely pre-vet the properties that they go to see, which means staging your home and hiring a professional photography service to take bright, wide photos of your space that make it look big, bright, and amazing.
Even the best photography, however, can’t replace the value of staging. You can’t use AI, either, since viewers will expect the space to look the same as what they saw online. Don’t worry if you don’t yet know how to make your home irresistible to buyers. There are guides online to help you, and your real estate agent is there with you through the process. Do it right, and see just how many people book to view your property.
• High Final Sale Price
More people means (hopefully) more people putting in an offer. That, in turn, can result in a bidding war. Sometimes that bidding war is open for others to see. In other cases, it’s a closed bid, so bidders can only bid what they’re comfortable with. Regardless of what the system is like near you, the result is the same – you can get a higher price point! From there, it’s all about choosing which bid you want to move forward with. Keep in mind that in some places, potential buyers can back out or then start nit-picking your home to get you to lower the price after the fact, so prioritize the quick sale over the highest if they are not one and the same.
• Faster Sale
The last thing that you want is for your property to be out on the market for too long. Waiting around for a buyer to bite puts everything in your life on hold, and can drastically make it harder to get funding or manage your finances. Dressing up your home so that it’s clean, staged, and well-photographed works to draw in a larger source of people so that you can then sell it faster and move forward with your life.
• Should You Repair or Just Stage?
Staging a home technically means cleaning it up and arranging your belongings so that it looks more open and neat. Think of it like getting ready for guests, only after you’ve partially packed up your belongings so your clutter and memorabilia aren’t out in the open. That’s the bare bones of staging. You can, of course, go so much further in terms of repairs and even decorating. If you have a bright, bold color scheme throughout your home, repainting it can make it appealing to the broadest range of buyers.
• Do the DIY-Friendly, Budget Friendly Updates
Small updates you can easily do for a low price are usually worth it. Repainting your property so that it’s a blank canvas to appeal to more buyers is smart. Making small repairs so that potential buyers can focus on the overall space and not small but glaring issues is clever. However, going out of your way to replace the roof before the buyer requests that done is a waste. There’s a chance that the buyer won’t even ask, and at that point, doing it yourself would just be a huge waste of your own budget.
• Don’t Forget Kerb Appeal
A great first impression can set the stage and help appeal your property to potential buyers. With that in mind, you may want to look into cleaning up the exterior of your property and even doing up the front garden a bit. You can go and get a few plants on sale at your local nursery, for example, and use those to stage your outdoor space for that wonderful first impression.
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