What is Home-staging ?

 

Home-staging is creating the perfect canvas for buyers to fall in love with your home by creating spaces where they can imagine themselves living happily.

 

Home-staging is creating the perfect canvas for buyers to fall in love with your home by creating spaces where they can imagine themselves living happily. Click To Tweet

 

The purpose of Home-staging is to maximise your home´s strengths and diminish or neutralise any cons it may have.

The main difficulty of Home-staging is that you are looking to appeal to the widest possible range of buyers, you don´t know their background, their taste or their needs, so you need to show the most neutral look possible.

In some cases, you can get a bit of information from your Real Estate agent (but not always). For example, if a family with small children will be house hunting, you will want to make the house look as safe as possible: no candles in dangerous places, open spaces to play in, etc…

We all love our home as it is but sometimes we make the assumption that everybody else will love it too, and that is freakin´ impossible!  So, no matter how much you love turtles, you might want to keep that 1,000,000-piece collection in a box!

Most buyers are uncapable of imagining a space without the furniture, the décor, the paint on the walls…and this is where Home-staging plays an important role.

By creating a neutral and functional space, you are giving them a white canvas where they can “paint” their own reality. Click To Tweet

It shouldn´t be too modern or too classic, too bright or too dark…it´s about finding the perfect balance.

You need to make them fall in love with your home and imagine themselves living there happily.

 

How can you create this neutral and appealing look?

 

• Keep furniture and décor to the minimum that way the space will seem roomier and bigger.
• Keep colours very muted: whites, and neutrals. In most cases, I advise to paint the whole house white, but it obviously depends on your budget and willingness to do the work.
• Put away trinkets, and very personal (taste) accessories, only display neutral ones.
• Choose accessories that are either a trend right now, to avoid the space looking outdated- or in natural materials (they appeal to a mayority of people), again, neutral and natural colours work best.
• Create styled compositions to give that designer look.
• Style cushions the designer way too (throws look good too).
• If your lighting is good, have it on when they come, or use it in your favour to enhance the best features.
• If you have a nice view, show it! Open the curtains (drapes) or doors to make sure the buyers see it.
• Keep personal things out of the way: hair brushes, tooth brushes, PJ´s, slippers, shoes…they need to feel that could be their home, not someone else´s.
• Create a beautiful flower arrangement (or more), this evokes freshness and beauty, again, go for quite discreet colours. Use just one or two colours at the most. White is always a good option.
• Be careful with smells or scents, not too strong or overpowering. Again, they need to feel it could be their own space.
• If you are looking to sell well, who isn´t? Be careful with the materials you use, the higher quality, the more value you give your home, the more expensive it looks, the more money you can ask for…well, you get the idea.

There´s plenty more things to consider and many other tips, but I hope this gives you a good start in creating an attractive space for buyers.

 

Have you got a property to sell? Let us help you. For more information on our Home-staging service, please contact us.  Whether you are a Private client looking to sell your property or a Real Estate agent , we have a solution for you.