Home staging is the act of cleaning, rearranging and remodeling parts of a property to make it more appealing to potential homebuyers. Professional home stagers are often brought in by real estate agents — or the agents practice a bit of staging themselves — to help homeowners make a house ready to show to potential homebuyers.
Here’s your guide to staging a home for sale from top to bottom:
— Why you should stage your home.
— How much does home staging cost?
— Which rooms should you stage?
— Home staging tips.
[See: 20 Moving Tips and Tricks.]
Why You Should Stage Your Home
Not everyone is easily sold on staging their house in order to sell it, but it’s a key part of helping buyers picture themselves living there, with their own furnishings and decor rather than your belongings.
“Depending on the market, it can lead to a 5%-10% increase in price. Creating the great first impression starts online with photos, and continues from the front door on,” wrote Lisa Morales, Realtor and owner of Team Morales with Coldwell Banker Realty in the Cincinnati metro area, in an email.
Staging ranges from simple decluttering to make a room feel less crowded to removing all the furniture and bringing in rented pieces for a more neutral palette. “The more staging you do, the more interest a home will receive. More interest typically leads to a faster sale at a higher price,” Morales says.
How Much Does Home Staging Cost?
The cost of home staging depends on who’s doing it and how much is going in or out of your home. Here are the most common scenarios.
Hiring House Stagers
Professional house stagers can come in not only to determine which of your belongings need to be rearranged and moved out of the house before putting it on the market, but also which projects could be taken on to maximize the final sale price, from repainting the dining room to installing new cabinet doors in the kitchen.
HomeAdvisor notes that it costs, on average, $1,766 to hire a home stager or decorator for staging purposes, but on the high end this service can be as much as $5,000. While many stagers offer a flat-rate consultation to help give you some information, typically costing a couple of hundred dollars, having a vacant property fully staged can cost a few thousand dollars.
Like everything involving your home sale, fees for home stagers vary based on location, demand and the amount of assistance you need. Simple advice on ensuring your home is ready for an open house will be far less expensive than a thorough staging by a team of professionals.
Storing Your Extra Possessions
One of the biggest lessons behind staging is to declutter your house — and that’s not just about removing miscellaneous papers on your kitchen table or cleaning up the kids’ toys scattered across the living room. It includes reducing the number of books on a shelf, swapping out an oversized sectional for a smaller couch and taking clothes out of the closet.
If you haven’t moved out of your house yet, there’s not exactly room to hide your excess belongings. Jessica Harris, an interior designer and manager of production design for furniture retailer Living Spaces, based in Southern California, recommends renting a storage unit to get items out of sight completely. “Do not store any overflow furniture or personal decor on the property,” Harris wrote in an email.
Depending on the amount of stuff you need to move out and where you live, storage can get pricey over a few months. But you don’t have many options, as stuffing the garage or backyard shed leaves your hoard to be viewed by potential buyers, who may be turned off if they can’t view those spaces when touring your home.
Furniture Rental
You’ve moved out that oversized sectional, but now you need to replace it with something that better highlights the space. Many professional stagers own furniture to be rented while a house is on the market, or you can rent from a local furniture place while your house is still being shown by your real estate agent.
“Our vacant properties are the best examples,” says Amy Cherry Taylor, associate broker and founder of one of the top real estate teams in the Fredericksburg, Virginia, area. “When a home is vacant, a buyer doesn’t have anything to look at other than floors and walls.”
Unflattering blemishes can make a property harder to sell. “The property has to be in pristine condition,” Taylor adds.
If renting furniture the entire time your home is on the market doesn’t fit in your budget, at least consider the more ideal, rented furniture for marketing photos, then either leave the space vacant or move your pieces back in with more low-key staging afterward for tours. Since pretty much all homebuyers start their search online, the pictures of your home are just as important as a tour, if not more so.
Which Rooms Should You Stage?
You don’t need to stage every room in your home with new furniture — a few important parts of the house will make the biggest impact. Since the front of your home will make the first impression on buyers, Morales recommends starting to enter through your front door instead of a side door or the garage. By getting in the habit of entering through the front, you’ll be more likely to notice extra shoes in the foyer, a doorbell that doesn’t work anymore or porch lights that have burned out.
Here’s a breakdown of the most common rooms to stage:
— Kitchen. Homebuyers largely view the kitchen as not just a place for cooking, but socializing as well. Keep the counters clear of too many coffee makers, mixers and cookbooks, but set up the kitchen table or breakfast bar like it’s ready for a snack or brunch.
— Bathrooms. Guest and primary bathrooms are important. Keep all toothbrushes, shampoos and soaps out of sight so no buyers are thinking about you getting ready there early in the morning. Have clean bathmats and towels that follow a color scheme to pull the room together.
— Living room. Common areas are important for homebuyers to envision how they’ll spend their free time. Keep all furniture appropriately sized so the space feels large, even if it’s not the biggest room.
— Primary bedroom. Keep the bed made at all times and add a couple of pillows and a fluffy comforter to make it look like a comfy space. Never let your laundry pile up on the floor. Don’t even let it all stay in your closet, for that matter.
— Tricky rooms. Even if it’s not one of the main rooms homebuyers care about, a weirdly shaped dining room or tiny side room can benefit from staging to help buyers figure out how the room can be used well. Instead of a queen-size bed in a small bedroom, a double bed can help emphasize the space that’s there, for example.
— When you’re still living at home. If your family is still living at the house while you’re marketing it, you can still stage the space, but it may need some extra organizing. Extra bedrooms in a vacant house may not get staged, but when you’re living there make sure to put kids’ toys away and consider repositioning the bunk beds or crib as far from the door as possible without blocking windows to make the room feel larger.
[Read: What Is Digital Curb Appeal?]
Home Staging Tips
Whether you’re staging your home yourself or hiring a professional stager, here are a few tips for making sure your home is ready to be seen by potential homebuyers:
Keep Your Own Style Out of It
You may have eclectic taste, but your buyer may not. Ron Resha, a real estate agent, consultant and home flipper at Coldwell Banker Realty in Canton, Massachusetts, says it’s important to declutter and depersonalize your home. “When they see the potential for a home to look and feel great, they are more likely to see themselves living there,” he says. “The property needs to appease the masses. Less is more.”
More often than not, you’ll find recommendations on staging err on the side of classic and simple, with neutral colors and the occasional accent color, and a traditional sofa, love seat or chair style in lieu of a gigantic sectional or avant-garde seats that can be distracting.
You may like a little quirk or find that bright colors make you happiest at home, but that’s not how everyone operates, and you want to focus on attracting the largest number of potential buyers possible.
Less Is More
Even if your house is clean, there’s some decluttering you can do. The No. 1 home improvement recommendation agents have for sellers is to declutter and fix property faults, according to the 2021 Profile of Home Staging from the National Association of Realtors, a report released every two years.
“One of the most important tips we give our clients is to declutter,” Taylor says.
“Clean off countertops and leave only the most necessary or staged items. Look at the floor in every room and put away anything that is on the floor that doesn’t need to be there. Use colorful pillows and blankets to stage family rooms and bedrooms and flowers in your kitchen or dining space,” Taylor adds.
Keep Pathways Clear
When arranging furniture to stage it for sale, the goal is to make each room look spacious and highlight an easy, sensible flow from room to room. “A good rule of thumb always allows a 36 (inch) pathway either around or between furniture pieces,” Harris says. “This will let potential buyers walk and explore comfortably within the space. This also tends to make the space look and feel larger than it is.”
Rearranging for these pathways may mean your couch isn’t properly positioned for ideal TV watching, which is OK when people are touring the house. If you have to unplug the TV and move it elsewhere in the room or to storage to highlight a picture window that’s otherwise partially covered, it’ll help buyers remember the room’s best features instead of your furniture.
Remove Personal Items
Part of your decluttering process should include removing all family photos, religious symbols and other personal items from view. If you have your kids’ school portraits on the wall leading upstairs, buyers will envision your kids enjoying the house rather than their own. Not only that, but sometimes buyers have a hard time removing bias from their mind when they’re touring a house, so avoid all possibility of discrimination by keeping any hints as to your race, religion or nationality private.
Keep It Basic
From wall colors to furniture styles, keep that same simple and classic theme in mind. While neutral colors and a traditional look may seem boring, the point of staging is to make it possible to see the potential for a space, rather than offer a specific suggestion as to how a room should be.
It’s best to avoid selecting a wall color that may seem too bright to one potential buyer, or include a large antique chaise lounge that makes it hard to remember the rest of the room.
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Always Be Ready to Show
Staging your house doesn’t stop once the stager moves in new furniture. The house should be ready for a tour at all times. That means no dishes in the sink, no homework spread out over the dining room table and no wet towels on the floor.
“Continue being very conscientious of all senses in the home: the smell, look, feel, etc. If a home feels clean and well-maintained, a buyer will be more comfortable in it and more likely to make an offer,” Morales says. “Ideally, if a home’s condition, location and price all match up, it won’t take many days of this before a home is pending.”
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How to Stage a House for Sale originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 03/08/23: This story was previously published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
