How to Stage a Home for Sale

09.23.18 by

staging bedroom

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Maximizing Your Greatest Asset:

How to Stage a Home for Sale

 There aren’t a lot of homes on the market these days, which means buyers can’t afford to take their time when finding the home of their dreams. However, you can still expect prospective buyers to look into every corner of your home and critique any flaw they see. As any realtor will tell you, your property has to be in pristine condition if you hope to turn heads and get a deal done. Making that happen depends to a very large extent on how well your home has been staged and whether you’re able to make a lasting and positive impression. Consider these tips from your REALTOR® Gabe Sanders for getting a home in tip-top shape.

Delight the Drive-Bys

The first thing passersby see, and your best chance for creating initial interest, is your property’s exterior. Chipped and dingy paint, indifferently cared-for landscaping and dirty siding can mean the “For Sale” sign will probably remain in the front yard for more time than you would like. Do everything you can to delight the drive-bys, the people out looking for a house that jumps out at them. Give the front door a nice, fresh coat of paint, add a new stand of colorful flowers near the entryway, and keep the yard picked up and well-manicured. If house numbers are falling off or damaged, replace them with shiny, reflective ones. It’s well worth your while to ensure your home’s exterior is immaculate. It’s your chance to make a great first impression and leave buyers anxious to see more.

Declutter and Organize

Buyers are looking for a home with plenty of space and flow, which means you should declutter and keep the number of items in each room to a minimum. Oversized furniture should be stored away while your home is being shown, loose objects must be picked up and organized, and personal items should be removed or de-emphasized. Buyers want to see an organized space, one that conveys a positive message about the job you’ve done maintaining the property. Consider having your home professionally cleaned, including carpeting, air ducts, vents, and furniture. The average price of a one-time house cleaning ranges from $93 to $171, in Stuart, Florida, and is a small price to pay to save time and sanity.

Take Care of Basic Maintenance

Visitors will certainly notice if you have leaky faucets or chipped tile in the kitchen. Take the time to make a room-by-room assessment of problems that would jump out if you were a buyer. Prepping a home for sale doesn’t mean you have to make expensive renovations, but it does mean you have to take care of repair issues — even insignificant ones. Left unattended, they send a negative message about the overall condition of your home.

Bath and Kitchen Improvements

Most homeowners will be more interested in your kitchen and bathroom space than any other part of the house. While it probably isn’t a good idea to invest heavily in new cabinets or install a jacuzzi, it’s a great idea to make minor improvements. Consider replacing faucet fixtures and doorknobs, replace your kitchen countertops with an appealing granite countertop, and upgrade the lighting.

Fresh Paint

Nothing freshens up a lived-in property quite like a new coat of paint. It makes your home look clean and new and, with a neutral or light shade applied throughout your home’s interior, potential buyers will be able to imagine how they’d transform your space. Consider repainting a room that has an experimental shade of lavender with a light gray or beige; you don’t want an outrageous color to distract a potential buyer.

A well-staged house can help you get maximum value from your home. It’s an essential step in the selling process and perhaps the single most important thing you can do to market your property. Make the most of the opportunity.

 

Article provided by Natalie Jones from HomeownerBliss.info.

Quick Touchup Ideas to aid your Palm City Home Staging Efforts

05.18.15 by

Quick Touchup Ideas to aid your Palm City Home Staging Efforts

 Palm City Home Staging Efforts

You’re eager to get your home sold quickly with a minimum of fuss. You’ve been over the comparables with your Realtor®; and the listing looks and reads great. It’s getting close to showing time—and although you know that your Palm City property is a great buy that any new owner would be proud to call home, you also know that this spring there is a lot of competition out there.

Producing a quick turnaround is about the marketing—which your agent is handling adroitly—but it’s also about presentation. That’s “staging”—an area you can definitely do something about!

According to the Room Solutions website, properly staging a home has been shown to reduce time on market by a factor of 5. Those comparison stats are notoriously hard to prove, but when a home has been stuck in the listings for months, undergoes professional staging, then sells in a fraction of the time, it is pretty convincing. But whether or not you decide to engage a full-on professional Palm City staging service, there are plenty of small scale DIY home improvements that take 30 minutes or less—but which make a big staging difference.

  • Reinvigorate the bathroom and other tiled areas by doing some grout cleaning. That grout between tiles may have been pristine when you first moved in, but years of use will take a toll. Use plain water and a stiff brush (they’re easy to find at any home center) to get rid of build-up and residue. Stubborn areas may need a spray bottle with a 50% solution of white vinegar: spray, leave it on for 5 minutes or so, then brush off and rinse. It really makes a difference when you bring the grout back to its original uniform tone.
  • Many a Palm City kitchen is burdened by an outmoded, timeworn backsplash. Replacing it may sound like a major project, but it is often possible to make quick work of it using one of the new peel-and-stick backsplash products. Instead of tearing up your kitchen and taking days to assemble a replacement, look into peel-and-stick tiling. These products come in many colors and styles—with installation processes that can have the entire project done in very short order.
  • Repainting whole rooms is not something that can be accomplished in minutes, but some rooms don’t need all that. Taking care of small but unsightly wall dings and scuffs will bolster first impressions—and often, just a few minor touchups can do the trick. If you don’t have the original paint style notes, some stores have computerized color-matching systems that recreate sample hues. Wood trim scuffs and stains can often be banished with colored felt pens or crayon color packs; more obscure tones may require a color matching kit. In any case, the time requirement is minor compared with the resulting subliminal improvement.
  • Stain kitchen cabinets. If yours is one of Palm City’s older homes with the original kitchen cabinets that remain dull no matter what you do, you can still avoid the time and expense of completely replacing them. Instead, renew the existing stain job or switch to a new tone that complements the kitchen.

Staging your Palm City home is an important adjunct to the overall marketing effort this Realtor provides. If you are looking for some energetic help in that department, I’m here to answer your phone call!

Home Staging: Add mirrors in all shapes and sizes!

10.02.10 by
Home Staging:  Add mirrors in all shapes and sizes!

When you want to spruce up a room, why not add a mirror? It can add light and depth, and you won’t have to push out a wall or add a window to do it.

A framed mirror is attractive, hanging alone or in a group. What’s more, it can be far less expensive than adding artwork to a wall and less risky. Sizable art pieces can overwhelm a room.

The big choice in mirror frames can make them compatible with any room of the house. A little care should be taken so the frame goes with the furniture. A rustic frame, for example, would be out of place in a room with polished furniture in cherry or white finishes.

Some decorators are leaning framed mirrors against a wall for a dramatic effect. They are choosing wide frames in a variety of finishes and hues. Even floor mirrors can be doubled or tripled for a striking effect.

In a small room, a standing mirror can do wonders. It opens up the space by reflecting the outdoors and the furniture. In bathrooms, the new trend is to upsize mirrors so they fill out the entire space above a long vanity or counter.

Some groups of three or four mirrors feature a drawing that continues from one to another, such as the tree branch drawn on four panels and offered by Made Goods.

For more information, visit our website or call us at (772) 888-2885.
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The Difference Between Selling And Dwelling

05.30.09 by
There is a special mindset associated with “staging” your home to sell in a soft market. Staging refers simply to the act of improving your home’s appearance in order to appeal to the widest segment of potential buyers. The approach you must adopt is to see your home with an objective eye.
Stop looking at your home as your “home,” and start visualizing it as the “product” it becomes when it enters the market. Both a real estate agent and a professional home stager can help to market your product successfully by highlighting positive features and downplaying less attractive aspects.
Since you may have a strong emotional attachment to your home, you may not fully appreciate hearing about a better way to show your offering, but try to recognize that the way you decorate to SELL may be quite different from the way you decorate to dwell. The appearance of space often trumps its functionality when impressing buyers.
Your goal is to sell quickly at a fair price. A survey by a large national real estate brokerage showed that staged homes sell in half the time, and another survey of REALTORS® showed that a $500 “staging” investment recouped 343% of that cost. So be prepared to swallow a little pride, move some furniture, and field better offers on the road to your successful sale.
Understanding real estate dilemmas and their solutions is our business, and we’ll happily share our knowledge with you. For more info, visit our website GabeSanders.com or call us at (772) 888-2885.