Getting ready to sell your home is not an easy task. Most likely, your home is your largest investment both financially and emotionally. The first step to preparing to sell your home is to stop thinking of it as your home. That’s right; it is no longer your home, but a house that is for sale in an often overcrowded market. And since you have competition, the whole point of preparing your home for sale is to gain the competitive edge to sell your home faster and for more money than the house for sale on the next block.
Enter a professional home stager. Home staging is the art of merchandising your house by taking the things that you already own and and rearranging them to make your house look larger and more appealing to the broadest possible audience of buyers. This is accomplished by de-personalizing and de-decorating your home so that potential buyers can mentally move into your home and imagine their things occupying your space.
You most likely have a beautiful home. And you most likely have some (many, in fact) beautiful things in your home. Unfortunately, you haven't opened a retail business to sell your belongings. You have opened your home to the public in order to sell IT. And it is your house that you want the public to see, not your beautiful things, not your family photographs, not your large collection of books. This is what staging is all about.
In addition to de-personalizing your home, home stagers de-clutter your home as well to make it appear larger, and more inviting. Professional home stagers help their clients lighten their load and pack away things that they own but will not need until they move into their new home, thus making their move easier and often cheaper.
Once the home is de-cluttered and de-personalized, the interior is made more neutral by lightening the wall colors, taking away curtains and updating flooring. This, of course is all done within a client's budget.
What Home Staging Is NOT
Many have misconceptions about the cost of home staging. It is not unusual for home stagers to receive phone calls from potential clients whose first question is "I don't think that I can afford to have my home staged." Home staging is not expensive! This perception that home staging is a costly renovation comes directly from the home staging programs on television. The way that these programs are structured is that the family goes away, and the home stager comes in with twenty skilled tradesmen who renovate bathrooms and kitchen, install new flooring and add new landscaping, often costing tens of thousands of dollars. This is an unrealistic expectation for what home staging is.
In a word, home staging is NOT home renovation. In some cases, recommendations are made for painting and replacing flooring in irreparable condition, but a home stager's job is to showcase a house with the minimum investment possible. And having a home professionally staged is usually quite affordable, especially when compared to a price reduction on a house that has been on the market for months.
 Neil Bindelglass is a professional home stager in Saratoga Springs and owner of Let Me Organize You. He is an expert article contributer on the topics of Saratoga home staging and home organizing.
Discover More Saratoga Home Staging Tips From Neil Bindelglass
|
