Home Staging is Merchandising Your Home for Sale

In Home Staging, Act One, the role of the home stager was first to ensure the home was in tiptop condition, with strong curb appeal outside and a neutral backdrop inside.  In Act Two, the home stager will make final preparations by styling your home for its moment in the spotlight.

Enhancing the Home’s Best Features

With its interior prepared as a neutral backdrop, the home is made ready for its best architectural features to come front and center.  Features like bay windows, fireplaces, moldings, an open floor plan, or a private garden are the players that will hook potential buyers and justify a higher asking price.  The home stager knows how to bring out a home’s best selling features through the art of placement.  When arranging the seller’s furnishings, each piece is purposely placed to draw the buyer’s eye to those architectural gems in the room.  Sometimes stagers use other design tricks to make positive features pop, or to make less attractive features fade away.  In the name game, a well-staged home will be called “the impeccable home with the crown molding and beautiful hardwood floors.”  And that’s just what you want.
 

Lighten and Brighten

Once the major furnishings have been placed, the home stager will address the home’s lighting.  Buyers want light, bright, open and airy spaces, so a home stager will seek to maximize both the natural and ambient lighting in the home.  Every fixture should be checked to ensure it holds the maximum wattage bulb as specified.  In many cases, a home stager will recommend taking down any heavy draperies that block natural light.  For every showing and Open House, all draperies, blinds and shades should be drawn open to let in as much natural light as possible, and all lamps and light fixtures throughout the home should be turned on.

Merchandising Your Home

The final step in home staging is akin to putting the whipped cream and cherry on the top of the sundae.  Home merchandising has been used to market model homes in the home building industry for years.  If you’ve ever toured a model home, you may have appreciated its stylish decor and possibly picked up a few design ideas in the process.  Builders use merchandising to set their new home model apart from the next builder and to show potential buyers what it feels like to live in the home. 

Home stagers apply these same merchandising principles to the resale home.   Indoors, picture a textured throw tossed on the leather chair, a bowl of bright, green apples on the coffee table, a fresh, floral arrangement on the foyer table, and fluffy, new towels in the guest bath.  In outdoor living spaces, imagine a bench with some brightly colored throw pillows placed in the shade of a tree, or a table set for outdoor dining on the patio. 

These finishing touches turn up the warmth in a home and strike an emotional chord with buyers.  Once they’ve been drawn into and have made that emotional connection with your well-staged home, chances are they’ll be making an offer.  Multiple offers…a higher asking price…happy sellers, happy realtor, busy home stager.  - The End -

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