Question: What exactly is "Staging" a house?
Answer: "Staging" is a proven technique to ensure that your house sells quickly for top dollar. Staging is neither interior design nor redecorating but rather almost an art form to present your house to all potential buyers in the best light possible. Statistically, staged homes can be demonstrated to sell for a 6.9% higher price with about a 50% less marketing time than non-staged houses.
As an Accredited Property Image Consultant™ (APIC), we include staging services in our marketing plan as a FREE, VALUE-ADDED service to you.
Following are some examples of what how staging can improve the way a house shows to potential buyers.
Kitchen 'Before' Staging Kitchen 'After' Staging
Dining Room 'Before' Staging Dining Room 'After' Staging
Living Room 'Before' Staging Living Room 'After' Staging
Here’s four 'do it yourself' staging tips you can do yourself that will make your NH home more appealing to potential home buyers:
- Pack away all the personal items including family photos, collections of anything, trophies, excess artwork, and that sort of thing. The reason we do that is that we don’t want buyers to be distracted looking at photos of your trip to Aruba or cute grandkids; they need to be doing what they’re there for and that is to look at your house and want to buy it.
- Rearrange your rooms and eliminate excess furniture so buyers can move through easily. ‘Lean out’ all the closets to avoid creating an impression of not enough storage. Basically pack up and put away out of the house all your out of season clothes and everything else you don’t use often or won’t be needing for the next few weeks.
- Start cleaning your house at the front door and don’t stop until you get to the back door. Clean everything in sight and things you don’t look at often like ceiling fan blades, the top of your refrigerator and other tall appliances. Everything has to be bright, shiny, and squeaky clean for your buyers.
- Walk out to the street in front of your house and take a look through potential buyer’s eyes. Here’s where your first chance to impress a buyer begins, curb appeal is one of the most underrated staging items. If a buyer pulls up in front of your house and sees a neatly trimmed lawn, fresh mulch, a clean front entry way with no overgrown bushes to drag on their clothing, no cobwebs above the front door and on the porch light, and a clean, freshly painted if need be, front door with bright shiny doorknobs and hardware, that will set a good tone for their visit. But if they see overgrown bushes, cobwebs that look as if you’ve decorated for Halloween but it’s April, and their agent has to work to get the key to open the front door, you can bet they’re going to be disappointed to some degree before they ever get inside and that is not a good first impression to make.
So just doing those 4 simple and very inexpensive things can put you and your house a lot further down the road to getting sold more quickly and for a better price than not spending the time to put it in showroom condition beforehand.
We're happy to drop by and give you a market valuation analysis of your Seacoast New Hampshire or southern Maine home. Having knowledge of what you can expect to sell for could be helpful to you in your decision making process.