Staging your home properly can make all the difference in whether you sell your home quickly or not. A well-staged property will fly off the proverbial shelves, whilst a poorly staged home can put off viewings, offers and stall a property’s chances of sale significantly. With that in mind, we’ve put together a checklist of 7 key checks you need to carry out in order to help your home sell as well as it can. Before we get to that point, though, it’s worth first looking at what staging actually is, and just why exactly it’s so important in the potential sale of a property.
What is Home Staging?
Home staging is the process of decorating, arranging and cleaning a property to showcase it once it’s on the property market. In other words, it’s a process to ensure your property looks (and feels) its best to maximise its chances of consequently being sold. You can think of it like a model getting new headshots to best showcase their various assets.
Why is Staging Important?
Mainly, because of how saturated and competitive the property market is at any one time! When there are so many properties on the market, you want yours to gain an advantage and stand out just that little bit more, in any way that you can. Staging offers one such way. Without it, it’s much harder to get your property noticed, particularly if the property doesn’t have any explicitly standout features of its own.
If you’re selling your home and you own a grade-2 listed windmill, for instance, then there’s most likely enough there in and of itself to get itself sold. By contrast, trying to sell a two-up, two-down newbuild is going to be more difficult, because there’s less there that automatically stands out. In the case of the latter, homeowners and estate agents need to find a way to gain that edge, otherwise you risk sinking into mediocrity. Are there any rooms that are especially important to stage, though? In short, yes!
What are the Most Important Rooms to Stage?
There’s a lot of debate surrounding this topic with some people flying the flag of the kitchen, whilst others will die on the living room hill. For us, the most important room to stage (and stage right) is the living room, then the kitchen, followed by the bedrooms, and finally the bathroom(s). The living room is as important as it is because no two rooms combine comfort and socialising in quite the same way; arguably the two most important aspects of a home, and thus the most important to show off.
Why the Living Room?
The kitchen offers a socialising hub, for instance, but it doesn’t typically have the same soft furnishings a lounge does. Conversely, you want your bedrooms to be comfortable, but there’s less of an onus on showcasing its use as a social space. That junction between the two is what makes staging the living room correctly so important. In this way, finding the right balance in how the living room is presented is arguably more important than any other room.
The Kitchen is Still Important…
It’s still important to stage the kitchen well, though, and you can get great reward from relatively minimal effort by just making sure it’s clean, tidy and all chromatic/metallic surfaces are polished up as much as possible. A little elbow grease goes a long way when it comes to showing off your kitchen space.
Bringing Out the Best of the Bedroom
You want your bedroom to be inviting, warm and cosy. You want it bright, yes, but not sterile – the bedroom is the place to retire, the place to escape, the place where we switch off. Again, then, it’s important to strike that balance between personality and precision, and learning what to gauge comes off as cosy chic, and what’s simply clutter.
General Staging Tips
In the living room, you want to create the impression of as much space as possible, for both photos going in brochures and on online listings, as well as for people viewing your property in person. With that in mind, decluttering is a must; if you usually use pouffes, ottomans or footrests, for example, then consider storing them away, just to ensure that that sense of flow is maintained throughout the house. You don’t want anybody wandering around your living room feeling as though they’re completing an obstacle course!
Another tip for the living room is to watch how much of your own family/personality shines through. We’re not saying you want the room to look as though it’s not been lived in, of course. At the same time, though, you want families passing through to be able to picture themselves in that space. Now, some people can look past decorations, ornaments and family portraits more easily than others. For others, though, such visualising can be difficult, and so an ‘emptier canvas’ often proves easier for their minds to work with, so to speak.
In the kitchen, tidy away as much as you can; it’s a room that sees daily use, and usually daily cleaning of some sort. Soap, rubber gloves, stray kitchen roll – they’re all super useful when it comes to keeping the kitchen in good shape, but not when it comes to shifting your property. Place yourself in the mind of a potential buyer, and walk into your kitchen – if you see something out that could be put in a cupboard, trust your instinct on it. A general rule with the kitchen and any bathrooms? The cleaner the better.
The 7 Essential Checks
When it comes to staging a property, you can get incredibly granular with the detail you put into it, and many people end up bordering on the obsessive with it. In truth, you don’t need to go quite so far as that, but there are 7 key checks you need to make sure you’ve ticked off when you’re trying to stage your home. So, without further ado…
- Make sure all light fittings work. Nothing is more off-putting than the thought of dodgy electrics. It might just be a case that you’ve forgotten to change a bulb, but the buyer doesn’t know that. If you’re dealing with something larger than a bulb you forgot to change, call in certified electricians to help make your home buyer ready.
- Clean your carpets – if you can, get them professionally cleaned before viewings commence. It really makes a difference.
- Consider ‘curb appeal’ – is your lawn unkempt and wild-looking? Could your patio do with a power wash? Perhaps a fresh lick of paint is needed on the shed walls and garden fence?
- If you’ve got viewings lined up, give your house a quick spritz of something nice-smelling before they arrive! Alternatively, brew a fresh cafetiere of coffee, or bake a loaf of bread; these subliminal touches can take the impression your home gives to the next level.
- Look for streaks and smears on windows and glass doors. When you’re using a sliding glass door everyday, you probably become immune to the countless grimy marks and stains that invariably appear. Buyers will notice, however, and it can quickly take the shine and magic off of a property.
- If there’s clutter? Clear it. Trinkets, widgets, gizmos and thingymajigs – they may all serve a purpose to you, but they don’t in selling your property. If it’s out on display, there ought to be a reason.
- Double (then triple) check the home before any viewings. The viewing is the chance to put your home’s best foot forward; you don’t want to be shooting yourself in said foot by leaving something out that shouldn’t be, or forgetting to clean the bathroom…