Home Staging for the Uninitiated

Home Staging

After endless hours scouring over the newspaper and internet for real estate advertisements, a property that resembles your ‘dream house’ finally decides to present itself. The size and layout seem perfectly tailored to your needs, which ultimately convinces you to make the arrangement for a house-viewing. However, upon arrival, you find that the study you had envisaged appears to be a dilapidated mess of storage, while the arrangement of the living room quarters cause difficulties for mere navigation and seems to have blended with the dining room. Despite the reassurances of the agent, the immediate sight of the home interior leads you to question whether this is really the house you are looking for…

Now if you were a seller in that scenario, this would be the stuff of nightmares: where a perfectly eager buyer is driven away by an ill-prepared home. Over the past few years, ‘home staging’ is a concept that has increased in prominence in the field of real estate. In the industry, the first impression of the home is of utmost importance – a key factor influencing the sale of your house which is formed by the buyer within the first ten seconds of the initial viewing. As such, a home should always be presented at its best in order to maximize the chances of a quick sale and home staging has become a valuable tool in enabling this to happen.

Home staging involves an initial de-cluttering and tidying of the household, followed by the arrangement of furniture to enhance the overall appeal of the home, thereby helping the buyer visualize it as their own. In the past homeowners have largely been left to their own devices in this regard, or perhaps working with some instruction from the agent to prepare their homes for viewing. However this can prove to be a complicated task for many. Those who are not well versed in the area of design and aesthetics can find it difficult to alter a pre-established household to appeal to prospective buyers in such a broad market, while also giving taking into consideration the need to maintain the house style and pricing.

In many cases, professional home-stagers – who are well practiced in the art of setting up a house for resale – are enlisted for help and can provide a highly efficient way of increasing the value of your home with minimal price and stress. Familiar in dealings with the market, the know-how of these professionals can be an invaluable add-on to the existing suite of home selling services that the owner is employing. Key pieces of furnishing or accessories are also rented out as part of the services provided by these companies as well as enhancing the overall aesthetic appeal of the home.

Ultimately, home staging is a simple concept which can be undertaken by an individual themselves or through the help of professional companies. When deciding on the process, it is most important for a home owner to weigh the pros and cons of both and decide which would be the most beneficial for their given situation: towards their goal of selling a house both fast an profitably.