Home Staging : Increasing Your Homes Market Value

Marketing your home is just like marketing any other product people buy or sell... you need to appeal to the buyer in order to get the sale.

The goal of staging a home is quite simple... to sell the property for the most amount of money, in the least amount of time.

If you can make your property appeal to the largest number of prospective buyers, you increase your chances of getting higher offers, in a shorter period of time or even possibly multiple offers.

The first step in staging your home is to de-clutter and depersonalize every room of your home. I tell people to use the 50% rule when de-cluttering their home. Go through every room in your house and try to reduce the amount of clutter including furniture by up to 50%. Think about it... you're selling your home so you have to move... why not get a head start on packing.

De-cluttering will make your rooms appear larger and will allow the buyer the opportunity to visualize their own personal belongings in place of yours. This brings us to the second part of this first step, which is depersonalizing. When you de-clutter your are in a sense depersonalizing at the same time... but you need to take this a step further and put away anything too personal. This would include family photos, religious items, or anything that might distract a buyer. The idea again is to allow the potential buyer to visualize their own personal items in place of yours.

The second step in staging your home now that you have created more space by de-cluttering and depersonalizing is to enhance to attractiveness of each room of your home. You can accomplish this quite easily with simple techniques such as having your blinds or curtains open to allow in as much light as possible. This makes your rooms appear larger. Also, if there is a section of a room that is poorly lit... consider using a floor lamp that you can turn on when your property is being shown so that the entire room is lit up nice and bright.

Now take a good look at the walls of each room... paint is one of the cheapest improvements you can make to a home to increase it's value and it wouldn't hurt to put on a fresh coat if needed. If re-painting, also consider neutral colours as this will appeal to the largest number of potential buyers.

Lastly, you probably have your furniture just the way you like it. However, if there is a more practical way to position your furniture it wouldn't hurt to re-arrange it. This is especially important if you have furniture in the middle of a room, such as a coach in the living room. It would be more practical to position a couch along a wall to free up the space in the middle of the room.

If you have outdated furniture, consider fabric covers, or pillows as a way of making the furniture more appealing. Or move some of your more dated furniture into a storage locker and get in touch with a home staging company that will bring in more modern furniture while you're home is on the market.

These few tips while help you increase your homes value and should help speed up the sale of your property.

Happy staging!


Jeff Flower is a Belleville real estate agent. Find out what your Belleville home is worth with our FREE Belleville Home Evaluation.