Staging Your Home? - Avoid These 5 Mistakes

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How to stage your home for sale

When selling your home, there are many factors to consider in order to make sure your home stands out and showcases its best features and attracts the highest number of potential buyers. 

Home staging has become a common strategy in preparing your home for sale. The goal is to ensure your property looks sleek, current, and reflects as much of a blank canvas as possible. You want potential buyers to be able to envision themselves and their families in the space. 

In our last home staging blog post, we discussed the benefits of home staging. Now, the property experts at Royal LePage Your Community Realty are bringing you the 5 mistakes you should avoid when staging your home.

Don’t over-personalize your home decorating 

One of the most common mistakes made when staging your home is to do so with your own personal interests and decorating tastes in mind. 

Over personalizing your home in your decorating choices will not work to create that blank canvas that you’re hoping to achieve. Remember - the goal is to maximize the value of your home’s potential in the mind of people walking through. In order to achieve this, the home needs to reflect an open space - not a space that’s already been filled and styled to your own tastes, which may not align the tastes of others. 

This will also be part of our note on decluttering, where we delve into the importance of not adding, but taking away in order to clear and depersonalize your home ahead of going up on the market. 

Don’t try to stage your home too fast and cut corners 

Have you ever heard the saying, “anything worth doing is worth doing right”? Well, this one applies to homestaging as well! Whether you’re taking the DIY route or using a professional to stage your home, this is not a task that should be rushed. 

Staging your home is a step-by-step process, and rushing the process or cutting corners will only end up costing you time and money. Time wasted to do a poor job is not a good use of energy and in staging your home in a subpar way, you will ultimately be losing out on the potential added value to your selling price that a well-staged home could bring in. 

Not taking advantage of a professional stager 

A professional home stager or home staging team will come with references and experience and be able to help you achieve your goals. This will typically begin with a consultation and visit to the home, to see the space in person. Your stagers will measure out the space, and, based on the decisions made as far as overall “look” they want to achieve, you will discuss pricing, scope of staging to be done and timelines. 

While many people still opt to do their own home staging - the DIY approach is not always ideal for projects of this nature. This is one aspect of design and decor where homeowners will not only benefit from the “design eye”, resources and experience of a staging professional, but they will also be able to operate objectively. They are new to the space, they don’t live there and have no personal ties to the property - so their ideas and concepts will reflect a fresh perspective that isn’t skewed by their own personal sense of style or attachments to the home.

This impartial viewpoint will ensure your home staging is done efficiently and in line with your ultimate goals. 

Neglecting simple home improvements 

When selling your home, the primary focus in your mind is most likely getting your desired price - within your ideal timeframe. So factoring in added time and costs may not feel like an appealing option. But sometimes it’s those simple home improvements that end up making the most impact. 

Here are a few examples of small home improvements that will go a long way to maximizing your home’s overall potential: 

Clean out gutters 

Your home’s eavestrough is a collection bin for seasonal debris and blown-around bits that essentially frames the roofline of your home. An overflowing gutter will instantly make a home look unkempt and neglected, making a poor first impression on passer-throughs and potential buyers. 

A fresh coat of paint on exterior doors, fences and window trims

Freshening up your home’s exterior details is always a good idea when listing your home for sale. In an all-season country, your home’s exterior weathers the brunt of all-season conditions and that takes a serious toll on your exterior structure and elements. Paint in particular will fade and chip away, and though you might not realize it, these components are part of the overall picture that makes the first impression for potential buyers. 

Update simple fixtures

Updating simple household fixtures like basic ceiling lights will go a long way in updating the overall look of your home. And nowadays, you can find beautiful, sleek and modern fixtures for very affordable prices from retail vendors like Wayfair.ca, Homesense, Home Depot - the list goes on. 

Another example of simple fixtures that go a long way when updated in a home is in the bathroom. Often, bathrooms are designed with hardware (handles and knobs) and lighting that reflects the trends of the time. When first designing these spaces, most people opt for classic tiles and paint colours, leaving easily-replaceable items like fixtures and hardware as the place to “have a little fun” with choosing more trendy and fun details. Making simple updates in the bathroom like changing overly-ornate and dated handles over to sleek and simple bar or rod-style pulls will go a long way in updating the space and relieving potential buyers of added “future renovation” costs as they weigh the pros and cons of your home. 

Tidy up your landscaping

Another exterior item that routinely requires attention and can make a big difference when preparing your home for sale is to tidy up your landscaping. This doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking and depends on the scope of property and landscaping design you already have in place. Cleaning up walkways and steps, ensuring the driveway is free of debris and power-washed, if possible, is a great start. From there you can do a quick scan of your yard to see if there are any visible weeds to be pulled, overgrown grass to be mowed or leaves and seasonal debris to be collected. 

Ticking these boxes will only amplify the value-added of staging your home, and in effect, boost your odds at finding a buyer who understands your home’s potential and worthiness of its listing price. 

Not cleaning and decluttering 

Cleaning and decluttering your home should always be the first step when exploring your options as far as home staging. 

Many people think of home staging and immediately begin the process of adding to their space before giving any thought to what they can take away first. Trimming the fat on bulky furniture and pulling back on personalized items, photography and tchockes that aren’t doing anything to showcase your home in its best light. 

By doing this, you open up your space and allow for that goal of a beautiful and current “black canvas” to really take form. 

When it comes right down to it, staging your home is as much about the steps you take before as it is about the actual staging process itself, and none of these steps should be skipped or rushed through. 

Royal LePage Your Community Realty is Canada’s largest independently-owned Royal LePage franchise, with over 1000 agents and 10 office locations to serve you and your clients. 

Contact us today to connect with a member of our team, who can provide you with everything you need to know about becoming part of Your Community Realty!

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