Home Staging Secrets

Hey, everybody, it’s Janine Sasso at your local Chicagoland realtor. And today, I will be revealing to you the secrets of a home stager. So stay tuned because you do not want to miss them. So let’s talk about staging. What is staging? Staging is really just selling a lifestyle. So when it comes to staging and getting it done, there’s a couple of things you should consider. And the first one is doing your research. Did you know that your home becomes a commodity once you enter it on the market? It is no longer your home as harsh as this sounds, but it becomes a commodity. And you need to ask yourself, who will be my buyer? Because this is the person that you want to target with your staging. The second best tip we can give you is to paint. If you don’t do anything else, painting is the one thing that should be on your to do list. And the reason is, buyers enjoy a fresh feel. They want those scuff marks covered. They want to make sure it is a blank slate that they can start off on. Now, not everything can be fixed with staging alone. You should also consider doing some minor repairs, such as recording the bathtubs to give it a nice, clean look. Maybe there is a broken step that you were meant to fix. All those little tiny details will be perceived by the buyer as something that is an unmaintained home. Something you haven’t taken care of. So you want to make sure your first impression is amazing. Make sure that you give the buyer no reason to nit pick your house.

Now, the next secret is really not a secret at all. It is all about purging. Okay. We’ve told many of our clients that if they are looking to enter the market, we want to make sure we are purging the stuff that has been stuck in closets that they haven’t played with. For the kids with the clothes that haven’t been worn, we want to really thin it out to make the closet look really spacious, the playroom look really big. Axes those furniture pieces we want to have removed because we want to show off the room sizes. It becomes an entire art when getting your home ready to sell. Now the home stagers also recommend for you to have a general marketing plan, and this is what your real tour is good at. You should hire a realtor that has a solid marketing plan that will align with your home. So it’s important to really go into detail and ask questions of what is your initial thought on how you will market my house? The next step we oftentimes get from our stagers is to depersonalize your buyers. Do not want to see the pictures of your children, your pets, your hobbies.

While we do appreciate you having all of those wonderful hobbies and life events, we want to make sure that the buyer walks in and he can envision his family pictures on the mantel and his pet pictures on the refrigerator. So you want to make sure you depersonalize as much as possible. The other thing that we get pointed out a lot and we do pass on to our sellers is you want to make sure that the room is showing was a function it was intended to. What does it mean? We see our downsizers having our four bedroom homes and one of the bedrooms is all of a sudden now an office and another one is a playroom. We want to try and get them back to bedroom purpose because the person looking for a four bedroom home is most likely going to need a four bedroom home. So having that perception of, Oh, this is an office, this is a playroom. Now there’s two bedrooms. Where are my other two bedrooms is not good on a buying and selling perspective. So we want to make sure that every room got returned back to its attendant purpose prior to showing.

The next thing you want to consider is creating a timeline. Having a step by step process of what to do, when to do it. And also, if you are looking into the act of marketing off the property. Always remember that it is in your best interest to capture that buyer at early as possible because this will most often equal the most amount of money in your pocket. Accumulating market time will start to have buyers having doubts about your property. They wonder why it’s still in the market. While it hasn’t sold, what is wrong with it? Which in turn will affect your bottom line. And of course, the last step you can hire professionals. Stager So if you need a professional stager, reach out. We do have references available and if you have any other questions, shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you. I would love to answer your questions. And other than that, I’ll catch you next time.

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