Tag Archives: tips

Four Common Staging Mistakes Every Seller Makes—and How to Avoid Them

Last time, we focused on commonly overlooked home staging tips. This time, we are continuing along those lines with some common mistakes that home sellers routinely make when staging their homes to sell.

When selling your home, it’s easy to make mistakes. Here are a few tips to help you avoid some of the most egregious errors:

1. Overdoing one color/theme. You may have heard that sticking to a theme in each room—particularly when choosing colors or decorations—is important. But equally as important is keeping a balance. You don’t want your buyers to be so distracted by one theme or color that they miss the finer points of your home.

2. Underestimating the power of natural light. No matter how beautiful the home, a dark room is usually not a winner. Remove dark or heavy curtains and try not to obscure windows with large furniture; this will help your buyer visualize your home’s full potential.

3. Failing to maximize space. Buyers love storage space and anything that screams of lots of storage—big closets, built-in bookshelves, etc. Make sure you clean out all of your closets, armoires, shelves, etc. before you show your home, because buyers will likely poke around in them to see how much space you have. One stager recommends investing in a few cute baskets or storage containers to hold small items, if you don’t have time to completely declutter before your first showing.

4. Using poor quality photos in online posting. Many, if not most, buyers start their house hunting with online searching. According to one realtor featured in Realtor Mag, “Most of your selling is online. You’ve got about five seconds to get them to look at the house before they go on to another one. That’s how critical photography is.” If you aren’t using professional assistance, make sure you have a good camera and tripod, and take multiple shots at different exposure settings.

Taylor Henley is an employee of Stage to Move. She collaborates with owner and home staging expert Kara Woods to produce blog posts that reflect the expertise and innovative design strategies of Stage to Move.

 

 

 

 

 

Home Staging 101: Decorating vs. Home Staging

When you think of your home, you probably think of the memories it reflects. Your favorite comfy chair, your kids’ graduation photos, the quaint teapot you picked up from your local flea market—all of these items make a house a home. Accordingly, you’ve likely decorated your home according to your personal style. While personalized decorating is essential to falling in love with your home, it’s exactly what needs to go when you try to sell it.

Home staging is, at its core, depersonalization. It’s allowing the buyer to mentally “move in” to your home. This is why home staging tends towards neutral colors and universal appeal. Here at Stage to Move, we position furniture and redecorate homes to maximize a home’s architectural attributes and showcase its best features in an organized, stylish, and polished way.

Another way of understanding this difference is to consider who is the intended audience of the change in appearance. Decorating a home is, obviously, done for the sole purpose of pleasing the home’s owners. Home staging, on the other hand, is intended to please an audience of potential buyers.

Also note that the audience is different. Home staging clients trust their home stagers to decorate their home to sell, not to live in. This gives stagers more creativity and freedom to do what they think is best. Decorating is intended to suit the needs and preferences of the owner for his or her own personal use. Thus, it is inherently more practical and more dependent on the specific tastes of the owner than on the creativity of the designer.

We understand that this can be difficult for many homeowners to grasp. However, it’s important to keep in mind that you are selling a product that happens to be your home. You want to make that product be the most appealing to the buyer, and sometimes that means depersonalization. And don’t forget that when you move into your new home, you can personalize as your heart desires—using all of that extra cash home staging will generate!

 The end result