While there are plenty of ways to sell a house faster, one particularly effective method is to stage a house. Not only will it improve the likelihood of a buyer purchasing your Okanagan real estate, but you can also customize your home to your buyer target audience to further sway their decision.
To be clear, staging a home means decorating your home with furniture, art, and so on to highlight your home’s best selling points and help buyers imagine themselves living there. First impressions are everything when it comes to selling Okanagan real estate so why not make it the best one possible?
Here are a few tips to keep in mind to get the best results.
Stage Your Okanagan Real Estate Properly: Only Stage the Rooms That Matter
Save time and effort for yourself trying to cover every single room. Not all of them need it. Staging is most effective when highlighting rooms that have the largest chance to sway a buyer one way or another. These include the living room, master bedroom, and kitchen.
Other bedrooms and bathrooms typically matter less to buyers, but if you feel any room could potentially wow people or sway their opinion in your favour, it should definitely be a space to consider staging.
Remove Your Personalization
Homes often become extensions of ourselves, but sadly, it’s time to undo that. While it can be difficult, you’ve decided it’s better to sell it so you need to do the hardest part and make your home less ‘you’.
This means removing items like portraits and pictures, clothes from closets, and bathroom toiletries from bathrooms. Avoid leaving religious items out as well. Remember, you want people to see themselves living there. The easier time they have doing that, without being influenced by personal décor choices, the easier it will be to sell.
De-Clutter Everywhere
Clutter is only going to make your home look smaller than it really is. This is exactly what you want to avoid. Get back to the essentials when tidying up—bigger homes mean more opportunities for buyers to see themselves grow in a space.
An easy way to decide is something could be considered clutter is how often you use it on a day-to-day basis. Rarely use an item? Pack it up. Keep your rooms and spaces as open as possible.
Closet storage can also factor into buying decisions. Pack up as much of your clothes as you can in them to maximize potential buyers seeing the closet storage opportunities.
Clean Your Home Thoroughly
It’s worth mentioning this twice: clean your home thoroughly! Home cleanliness should be a main priority when trying to make a home as appealing as possible.
Put yourself in a buyer’s shoes (maybe even one who’s afraid of germs), does the state of this room/area/space feel gross or disgusting in any way? If this wasn’t your home, would you really feel comfortable moving into a space that was left like this?
A clean home is also a good indication that the property is well-maintained—another big selling point for buyers. Cleanliness is a great way to make someone feel comfortable in a space, so it’s a no-brainer to do it when you’re staging a home.
Fix What’s Broken or Could Use Mending
There’s a good chance your home has accrued dings, scratches, and cuts in areas you’d prefer they didn’t happen. Now is the time to fix them if you haven’t already. Melamine foam erasers (i.e. magic erasers) are perfect for removing scuffs on walls. Caulk and/or spackle areas with gashes or dents and paint over with the appropriate colour.
Speaking of paint, this is the perfect time to touch up paint chips. You could even consider repainting with neutral colours (again, going for mass-appeal here) if any room is a bit too bright.
The last thing you want people to think is that someone with serious anger issues and disrespect for property lived there—so repair that gaping hole in the wall. It’s in your best interests.
Overall, you should consider staging your Okanagan real estate if you want it to sell quickly. Even if you can make the effort in small ways through cleaning and de-cluttering, you’ll have more interested buyers on your hands that much faster. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on staging for it to be effective—just make smart decisions. Once you’ve done that, it’s just a matter of waiting for the right buyer.