One of my favorite parts of being a realtor is being able to help sellers get their homes ready for sale. You see and hear a lot about staging but from my perspective it is how you take a house that someone is living in and turn it into something that makes a buyer say "wow, this is the house for me." There is a big disconnect between those things--how we live and what makes us want to buy--and therein lies the challenge of staging a home.
Some sellers will let you do more with staging than others. I am currently working with a seller that is going to let me be a little more creative. Reason being, of course, that the seller wants to get the most money possible for their home. So I am working on creative ideas that will really make this house pop.
The house is only a couple of years old and in very good condition...not perfect, but no house is when you've got toddlers running around the place! Those issues that it does have, however, are very fixable. The one thing that I think needs to be addressed is how to warm the place up in an elegant way. It's an aspirational neighborhood, and part of what you are selling is the lifestyle, not just the house. Currently there isn't much in the way of furniture and the house still has that flat, white builder's paint on it, so you walk in and it just doesn't portray the potential that the house really has--the house wants to be an elegant, beautiful home (and the buyer wants it to be that too!), but currently, it's not doing that, although the bones are there. In the decor it really reflects the fact that the owners don't have time to do much except raise their two young children!
So I am thinking of ways to warm it up and show off its great spaces. Got a great idea from Home Depot today, which is to do an accent wall with a cherry blossom stencil in Wedgwood colors. I was thinking this would be a great, dramatic treatment for the front entry and would bring a little bit of the outside in. It's also a great way to handle the fact that the entryway wall has quite a few little areas where the little ones got a little out of hand with the marking pens and crayons!
We are also renting furniture to give the home the right look--not Ikea stuff. Anyone who knows me will tell you I love Ikea, but it's furniture isn't appropriate for staging all homes. It can work well for a modern space, but it doesn't work as well for a more traditional type of home, which this one is. So, a quick phone call to Cort furniture rental and we can give this home a completely different look for a very reasonable price.
I just consider these things to be part of the marketing expense of the home. Marketing dollars can go towards a variety of things, only a few of which are truly effective at getting the home sold. Personally, those are the areas where I would prefer to spend the money. For the same money as it will cost me to rent furniture, I could spend the money putting an ad in the paper, which will most likely not result in finding a buyer for this particular home. Personally, I would rather spend the money doing the things that I know will make a difference towards getting it sold for this seller--making sure it shows its very best and looks the part of a house that the target market will want to buy.
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