Putting a home on the market can be a stressful experience. Sometimes it seems like homes sell almost before you can get them listed, while others appear to languish due to shifts in the economy and buyer enthusiasm. Fortunately, there are ways that you can increase the likelihood of your home selling even if the market isn’t at its best. One of these options is to improve your home staging so that potential buyers will be wowed by the property and want to make it their own.
Some people view home staging as simply making sure that everything is neat and orderly so that buyers can see the home at its best. While this is important, it’s not the only thing that you can do to improve the appeal of your home. Here are a few unexpected ways that you can make your home look better to prospective buyers.
When staging your home, you want to make sure that you not only present its best qualities but that you also reduce the impact of some of its less-great aspects. Take your bathrooms for instance. If one or more of the bathrooms in your home seem kind of small, try putting a larger bathroom mirror in there to make the whole room seem bigger. Also, hang it slightly lower if possible so that you don’t have a large mirrored surface looming over visitors’ heads; ideally, the center of the mirror should be slightly below eye level for the average person using it.
Another tip that can work in both bathrooms and any room that seems a bit too dark is to lighten up the walls to improve the overall brightness of the room. This can be as simple as replacing dark colored curtains with light white ones or adding white hand towels and decorative items to add light areas to the room. If you feel like taking in a larger project, add a couple of coats of paint in a light color that goes well with existing decorations, such as a light blue or soft light green.
Tweaking your furniture and decorations is another way that you can improve your home staging and make your home a must-buy. If you wish that you had some more upscale furniture to show off, talk to developers that have model homes available in planned communities around where you live. Much of that furniture is used solely for staging, and excess pieces can usually be bought relatively cheaply since they’re considered used. Staging companies in your area may also have furniture available for rent or purchase under similar terms. The best part is, if you buy the furniture for your staging then you may be able to recoup some of your money by selling the furniture along with the house.
While you want buyers to like the way that your home looks, it’s also important that they think it looks comfortable and ready for them to move in. Add fluffy comforters and knit throws to beds, drape a soft blanket along the back of the couch, and add other little touches to make it look like the house is just waiting for someone to make it theirs. Just be sure that you remove photos and other personal items from the home before the staging since you want potential buyers to picture it as their house and not yours.
One last thing that you can do to improve your staging is to go ahead and finish some of the little repairs around the house that you never quite got around to doing. If you need a handyman or contractor to help, HomeKeepr can hook you up. Creating a HomeKeepr account is free, and you can use our app to connect with pros in your area to take care of the little repairs and improvements that will really help take your home from being on the market to being sold.