With the holidays over and the Greater Toronto Area spring Real Estate market quickly approaching, many homeowners who are listing their home for sale are pondering what they can do to get their homes ready to sell faster than the competition.
Television Programs like Take this House and SELL It!, House Doctor (UK), The Stagers and the Unsellables have been both entertaining and educating homeowners to explore using Home Staging to sell their homes much faster and usually for more money than the competition. (more…)
Selling a home or property requires a lot of preparations. You simply cannot just think about your pricing and your marketing tactic. You also need to ensure that your home is up and about, ready to embrace its new owner.
In the industry of home trade and realty, preparing a house for sale is home staging. It is the act or art of making a home attractive enough to encourage prospective buyers to take notice. It is merely about preparing a home to meet its prospective buyer. There is no doubt that a tidy, clean, well-organized, livable home will stand out among the many properties that are available in the market. (more…)
The number one request that I get from all of my clients, whether they are from my Home Staging Training Company, Marketing and Networking Business, one of my Speaking Clients, all of them, are always looking for a way to be more creative, or at least add more creativity to their marketing efforts and effectively combine it with business. For some reason, we have been conditioned that the two don’t go together… but they MUST!
Over the years, people have constantly told me how “Creative or Imaginative” I am. Funny, I never thought of myself as such, but I am a self-professed dreamer, and I love letting my imagination run wild…which can be good, and of course, bad as well! (more…)
Clean
Buyers are not going to be impressed with a house that is filled with clutter. Get rid of all items you don’t need by having a yard sale. Make sure your home still looks lived in, but get rid of anything unnecessary. This way, buyers will be able to more easily see how their belongings would fit inside your space.
Depersonalize
You should remove all family photographs and heirlooms. You want the buyer to be picturing their items in your home-they don’t need to be distracted by yours. Also, take most knick-knacks off of the surfaces and most books off of your bookshelves. You don’t want the buyer to be wondering about what kind of people live here currently-that will just serve as a distraction to the wonderful features of your home. (more…)
Staging your home, so that its’ appeal to potential buyers is increased, is largely a matter of removing your own influence from the property, making it appear more spacious and ensuring that everything is in good condition. All parts of the home, inside and out, should be considered. The intention is to help buyers imagine themselves living in the house.
A great deal of this can be accomplished just by tidying up the clutter and mess that seems to accumulate in every home. As you will be moving anyway, you can get a head start on the packing by putting everything you won’t need immediately away into boxes. These can be stored in an attic or garage, at a friend’s house, or in a rented storage facility. This will take away the personal touches that make it feel like home to you, but which can be distracting for buyers, particularly if they do not share your tastes. It will also make the house look bigger, particularly if you clear out and tidy your closets and other storage areas, to make them appear more spacious. Keep surfaces as empty as possible, for example by putting any appliances in the kitchen away into the cupboards. An emptier room will look bigger. (more…)
Unfortunately, in the middle of the economic downturn that we are currently living through, there are a lot of people who are having a difficult time just making their monthly mortgage payments on time. As a result of this very unfortunate situation, many of these people have been forced to list their homes on the “for sale” market. Probably every one of them, at one time or another, has been advised that if they really need to sell the property quickly, they must first properly prepare it. Preparing your home is not the same thing as staging the area. It is vitally important that people understand and realize the difference between these two words.
First of all many people confuse the meaning of the words designing and decorating. It is easy to remember the difference between the two of them if you reason out the process. Decorating is always the last thing any of us do in our homes. Designing is to create, decorating is to embellish. The same process applies to preparing a home for sale, compared to staging it. (more…)
Home staging is often common sense, like repairing broken fittings, but also experience has shown that there are certain common ideas that can be applied to any house, and certain things that make a big difference in return for only a limited effort and expenditure.
These are some of the tips that feature regularly in newspaper and TV advice, and which either add to the perceived value of your property, or improve its saleability by appealing to more people. (more…)
As a Realtor in Calgary, I am always amazed how many times I go through a property for sale that looked as if a tornado had ripped through it. Selling a home is like marketing any other product on the market.
If it is presented poorly it will sell less than its potential. With the advent of the internet, it is even more critical to prepare your home for all online marketing. Did you know 8 out of 10 buyers start there search online! Buyers are viewing online photographs, virtual tours, & videos of home for sale. So home staging has never been more important. If your home does not show well online, you will have less or no buyers interested in your property. (more…)
