Staging Your Home for a Quick Sale

April 07, 2009 – (RealEstateRama) — Home Staging is the very best proven way to get top dollar for your home as you prepare it for sale. Having your home staged by a Professional Home Stager will aid in selling it faster and for more money!

Staging sets the scene throughout the entire house to create immediate buyer interest in your property. This leads to your home selling for the highest possible price in today’s market. Remember, “The way you live in your home, and the way you market and sell your home are two different things.”

It is very difficult for a homeowner to look at their home objectively, and if you can’t look at something objectively then you cannot market it effectively. You’ve got one shot to make a great first impression. Home staging isn’t as expensive as you might think! First of all, forget what you have seen about home staging on HGTV. The television shows that depict home staging often have very little to do with the real world practice of preparing your home for sale. Staging your home is much less expensive than having to lower your asking price by 20 percent to 40 percent.

The first step to take is to make an impartial assessment of your home. Is it furnished? Does it look dated? Is it cluttered? Is it dirty? Does it have curb appeal? What does my back yard look like? Most professional home stagers In the Northern California area, will typically offer to do a consultation that should cost between $100 and $500, depending on the size of the home. They will come to your home, spend about an hour with you, and prepare a document that will guide you, room by room, through what you need to do to prepare your home for sale.

Along with the consultation document, they will also give you a proposal of what it will cost for them (rather than you, the homeowner) to do the work. If your budget does not allow a full staging, a professional home stager should work with what you can afford. Instead of doing the staging for you, they will act as a consultant to your project and will visit you several times in order to guide you through the staging. This will substantially reducing the staging fee.

On average, a complete full home staging for an occupied house should cost between $500 to $5,000, again depending on the size of the home and the full extent of what needs to be done.

If the house is unoccupied (whether it is new construction or simply vacant), the cost of the professional staging can be a little more costly, but remember a vacant home will not sell as fast and usually doesn’t sell for top dollar. If you have ever looked at a model home fully furnished and then went into the same model home unfurnished you understand completely why. You tend to spend less time in the un-staged home and tend to look for and see its faults.

When staging the home you will always want to invest in the main living areas: Kitchen, Living room(s), dining room(s) and Master bedroom and bath. These are the rooms that potential buyers will spend the most time in and critique the most. Don’t forget the front and back yard. A potential buyer will drive right by your house if they don’t like the what they see. Think curb appeal.

Emotion makes the biggest impact on a buyer! When we stage a home, we are creating an emotion that appeals to a broad group of people.

You will want to consider who your target market is? Whether it is a car, clothes or a house; we make purchases with emotion, we fall in love with it, we’ve got to have it, we imagine a better life by having it. Outdated furniture, the incorrect placement of furniture and décor, outdated décor and personal items such as family photos, shampoo bottles in the shower, toothbrushes on the bathroom counter and especially dirty laundry laying around completely detracts from that positive emotion.

When finding a professional home stager in your area, you will want to look at their past work, ask to see their portfolio or check out their Web sites. You want to make sure that your professional home stager is a full time stager and is available to you. You are not only buying their service, you are buying their expertise and personality.

Ryan Dressel is a successful and sought after home stager, having recently been featured on HGTV’s The Big Reveal. He is the owner of Stage Right Designs and can be reached at 916-517-5710 or www.StageRightDesignLLC.com