Avoid These Home Staging Mistakes and Sell Your Listings Faster

Home staging is a method of decorating a property designed to showcase its best assets to speed up the selling process, impress buyers, and increase the selling price. Not all people choose to stage their house, especially the owners of homes priced lower, and many who do make many home staging mistakes.

Is it Better to Sell a Home Empty or Staged?

You don’t necessarily need to stage your home, but you should. Why opt out when it can increase the selling price and shorten the market time? It can be one of the most profitable steps to sell a property. Here is why you should stage your house:

1. Emotional Impact

Like a job interview, an excellent first impression is essential in selling a house. For potential buyers, facts like how big the place is, where it is located, and other facilities and amenities are crucial, but what excites them is picturing themselves in the house. A bare house is cold and hard to imagine as a home. Staging the house, on the other hand, creates an emotional impact in the hearts and minds of customers, increasing the chances of making a sale for a bigger price.

2. Offering Price

Staging can encourage home buyers by reducing the number of issues that need to be fixed. Before staging, you may need to make some improvements. These changes may be overlooked if the house isn’t staged, potentially affecting the offering price.

3. Better Marketing

An empty home does not tell much of a story for promotional purposes. Staging the house helps those you are marketing to visualize themselves in it. This might make them want to come and visit the place in person. Buyers’ tastes in home décor might differ from yours, but staging will help them understand how it would feel to live there.

What Should You Avoid When Staging a Home?

Assuming you agree with the benefits of staging, let’s proceed to what you want to avoid. Staging the house may seem like a simple task, but there are a lot of home staging mistakes sellers and rookie agents make that work against selling the house. Let’s see what they are:

1. Not Preparing the House Before Staging

One might imagine staging the house is good enough to make it look desirable and hide the potential problems the house might have. This is a grave home staging mistake. There will always be cracks, tears, dents, and minor fixes that should be fixed. Stagers do wonders but cannot hide problems like damaged paint. Before staging, go through the house and spot any issues with the color, floor, etc. A staged place with bad paint is not an incredible sight to see. Neglecting this could immediately compromise your chances of making a great first impression with home buyers.

2. Lack of a Strategy

A few best practices for staging work well with most properties. But staging without a clear plan and strategy won’t work. Sit down and think about it: Who would buy the house? What is the property like, and what can be done? How easily can it be sold? Who is going to be most interested in buying it?

When staging your home, you should always consider your target audience: the person most likely to buy the house. Look around the neighborhood and pay attention to those who have moved in recently. Share your findings with your stager. If senior citizens dominate an area, staging the house for a family of four might not be the best option.

Stagers are professionals who understand marketing and demographics and must be informed about the target audience. If you pay them for flawless work, let them have all the necessary information. They may not ask you themselves.

3. Not Using Virtual Tours

Staging is critical, and once you stage the house, you create a path to more marketing options. You could ask for professional help to create virtual tours. Virtual tours are 3D simulations of properties using cutting-edge technology where users can navigate around the house on their phones and computers, just like the sample below. Give it a shot yourself:

Virtual tours were once quite expensive, but now you can have them for an affordable price and 24-hour turnaround. Book one now!

4. Using Too Much Furniture

It is a common home staging mistake to stuff the house with too much furniture, thinking the more is the better. This might give the false assumption that the rooms are cramped and not spacious enough. The buyer will have difficulty imagining how they will fit their furniture. Use furniture in moderation.

On the other hand, using large furniture like big sofas, especially in dark colors, can take up a lot of space. Trying to use more miniature furniture in light colors to show the space available around the house. Make sure one piece of furniture does not dominate the room. 

Also, leave surfaces clear and avoid clutter. These are the spaces home buyers would like to see, and putting all those objects and decorations will not allow that. Fight the temptation to put that vase on the counter. Keep the clutter away.

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5. Leaving Too Much Space

Moderation again. Some agents may end up leaving the house with too much space. In other cases, they push the furniture to the walls to show how spacious the home is. Although this can be advantageous if done right, if overdone, it looks bare and uninviting.

Also, leaving some rooms empty is a bad idea. You don’t have to set up all the rooms with expensive furniture, but don’t leave them empty. Go with simple and minimalist pieces for the rooms so that the buyer can get an idea of the home’s overall look.

6. Keeping it Too Personal

When living in a house, you decorate it to your taste. There will be a lot of personal touches around the house, but that will not appeal to all home buyers. Furthermore, your personal belongings may alienate home buyers and prevent them from imagining themselves in the space. Buyers must focus on your home’s best features, not on your family photos. Take those photos down and replace them with some images of nature or a mirror. 

Given the influence the seller can have, it may be better to take the stager to the house without the seller. They can plan the staging the right way without any influence. Your job is to make the seller accept the changes for marketing goals.
For best results, keep the seller and the stager apart. They don’t need to talk to each other or discuss staging. Letting the seller interfere in the process is a vast home staging mistake.

7. Filling the Closets

Home buyers would like to see the space a house provides, and one of the most important places in this regard is the closets. As a result, filling the cabinets with clothes is not a wise move as it makes the buyer think there is insufficient space or will stop them from assessing the space closets provide.

Homebuyers will certainly open cupboards and closets. So, having the point above in mind, have a plan to stage the inside of these as well. You want to leave the best impression possible. Buyers will check every nook and cranny.

8. Doing it Yourself

DIY projects are so satisfying and rewarding, but not for home staging. Leave this one alone. This includes the seller. Let the stagers do their job and turn the property into something home buyers want. Stagers know what to do based on the various market segment requirements. Unless trained as stagers, best leave it to them.

9. Bare Beds or Cheap Covers

It does not matter how big the house and its bedrooms are. Beds will take up a large amount of space and will be the bedroom’s focal point. When something gets that much attention, you must think about it when staging. Leaving the bed frame empty or using cheap covers and linens muddies the excellent image the buyers have had in their minds. Keep the bed in top shape with beautiful, high-quality coverings.

If you are trying to keep the expenses low, use air mattresses as they are pretty inexpensive, but don’t cut back on linens.

10. Smells and Odors

When people live in a place, they get used to all the smells in the house. You might realize this when you enter somebody else’s house. They are harmless to the property’s residents, but home buyers may disapprove of the weird smell from your pets lingering in the place. Make sure to get rid of any scent that shouldn’t be there.

Some people try to eliminate the odor by using strong air fresheners. The strong scent of the air fresher will probably not appeal to the home buyer. Your best bet is heavy cleaning and the use of baking soda. There is no working around the problem here. Get rid of the odor.

11. Not Including Visual Content

To de-personalize the home, some sellers end up prepping the house in plain colors. This may not look terrible, but it won’t make your house unique. Try to include some visual contrast in colors; you can go with the 60-30-10 rule. 60% is for the main shade, 30% is for the secondary, and 10% is for the eye-catching remaining sections. The first two can be relatively natural, while the others are wild. Be careful not to paint the house in too many colors.

Second, dark paint may work in certain rooms but do not overdo it. Dark colors may make a room feel small. Neutral, light colors are the best option when selling your home.

Also, leaving the walls unpainted because you think the home buyers would like to paint the wall according to their taste is a home staging mistake. 

12. Saving Money on Home Stagers

For best results, your home stager must have the knowledge and the talent to utilize creative design talents to help produce quicker sales. 

Do not go cheap on home stagers. You don’t have to pick the most expensive stager on the market. Choose someone who knows his way around the house and the job. Hiring a cheap stager will result in a more significant profit than what you hope to save.

13. Old Window Treatment

Curtains and blinds play an essential role in the overall look of the place. Keeping the old, outdated blinds might save you some money but will ruin the new feeling and sensation of the house even if you love them so much.

Changing the curtains won’t cost you much but will be rewarding. Go with a simple white look; you will be fine, as it matches any theme and decoration. Avoid using patterns as they appeal differently to different people and tastes.

14. Not Taking Pictures Before Staging

When you stage the house, you might change some rooms’ functions. For example, a bedroom changes to a home office. However, the homebuyer might want to see what it looked like as a bedroom. If you have not taken pre-staging photos, then you are for some expensive digital modeling. 

To avoid such predicaments, always ask your photographer to take some photos of the house before the staging starts. This allows you to stage the home in different ways virtually. 

15. Rushing the Stager

You hire the stager for the perfect job, hoping for the best outcome. You might run tight on time, or the seller might ask you to speed things up. However, the stager needs time to plan and think it through when implementing changes.

Rushing the stager will only result in a poorly done staging that may meet your deadlines but will not fulfill what you had in mind regarding quality and outcome. So, planning the whole process and setting aside enough time for staging is advisable to avoid rush jobs.

16. Using Fake Plants or Objects

Why would you go for fake plants when you could buy the real ones? Artificial plants are not cheap, and even the best ones are often unrealistic. They fail at conveying a sense of authenticity and may make the house feel staged.

Staging the house with fake objects like wine and dinner settings is a real turn-off for the same reason. 

17. Forgetting About the Exterior Areas and The Entryway

First impressions matter and might stay with the homebuyer for the whole visiting session. Trim the bushes and plant flowers so that the first impression is beautiful. Failing at this will hurt the homebuyer’s decision even if you have mastered the inside perfectly.

The entryway also falls in the same category as one of the first places the home buyer will see. If it does not have a welcoming feeling and is dim and dark, it will wipe the smile off the homebuyer’s face. That’s not a great start.

Takeaways

Staging directly impacts how soon the house will sell or if it will sell at all. Many agents make a lot of home staging mistakes. Long and short of it, the staging needs to be done professionally without the presence of the home seller. Keep things in moderation and avoid overdoing or not doing enough. Have a plan ahead, and you will be good to go. 

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