When you buy a Denver home of your own, one thing that comes with the keys is the right to change it to reflect your personality, your decorating preferences, and your needs. When it's time to sell it - if you really want to give those keys to the next owner in a timely manner - you need to bring the home back to a neutral, model-home state through a process known as staging.
Professional stagers make their money by transforming your home to a place that buyers can see as "their" home. Stagers know that purchasing a home is not a cold, emotional decision for most buyers. Most people are buying a home to raise their family or accommodate a lifestyle. They want to visualize their kids sleeping in the big bedroom down the hall from the bathroom or playing Wii in the family room. They want to see their friends enjoying a cookout in the spacious backyard. To encourage the buyer to start visualizing, the stager's job is to move anything that might be in the way.
Staging is not about decorating or cleaning, though the first step after cleaning is removing clutter - or anything that might be perceived as clutter. You may like your appliances lined up on the counter, ready for action. The buyer will regard this as lack of cupboard space. You may be rightly proud of your shelves crammed with the kids' soccer trophies or your collection of NFL memorabilia. The buyer might get more wrapped up in your life than in the features of the home.
Because homes are personal to each of us, it is easy to take the stager's advice personally and regard it as a criticism of personal taste. Coming from a more neutral perspective, a stager is only trying to bring out your home's best features so it sells in the shortest amount of time. This is why it's best to hire a professional to do the job. It is hard to be objective about staging your own home.
If the stager finds you have too much furniture in a room or too many other distracting things arranged throughout, she may suggest you store some things in the garage or offsite. Though this can be an unsettling way to spend your last months in your home, the current market puts new demands on sellers to let their homes do the talking. A stager's job is to make sure that voice comes through loud and clear.
There's no better way to make it through the inconvenience of staging than to focus on your next home. At Bandy Homes, we can help you find that new home in Aurora or any other greater Denver community - as well as help you find a staging professional to help you sell your current home.
Marianne Bandy
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