Intro to Home Staging
Welcome to the inaugral post for my new blog on home staging. My name is Sharon Roark and I'm an agent who specializes in staging the homes I sell to give my clients in the Lexington KY area the best results possible. I started this blog to share information about home staging and how it affects houses for sale in the Lexington market.
First, let me dispel with a couple of home staging myths.
Myth #1: Paint all the walls "hospital white" or "builder beige" to help a home sell faster. Not true. While these colors may be okay in some cases, buyers tend to respond much more favorably to warm colors like taupe, tan and soft sage green. What we're going for here is to use color to help prospective buyers feel "at home" when they come to your house and plain white or beige don't usually give off that "feels like home' feeling.
Myth#2: I've decluttered and taken down my personal photos so my home's staged. Once again, simply not true. While decluttering and removing personal photos are the first steps in staging a home for sale, they are just that -- first steps, not the final steps. Once they're completed, that's when an experienced home stager can make a world of difference in your home's appeal. A good stager will know how to work with your furniture and with colors to help enhance your home's appeal. And the proper placement of accessories can make all the difference.
One of the principles I follow when staging a home is that it's important to create "emotional touchpoints" in the home's primary rooms. This means placing certain accessories in a way that will help the buyer envision himself/herself doing something pleasurable in the room. When they can "see" themselves enjoying the room, they're on their way to buying that home. And believe it or not, when I look at model homes in Lexington or elsewhere in Kentucky, I find many of them missing this essential element. The seller may have gone to great trouble to place exquisite furniture in the house, but it doesn't "feel" like a home, it feels like a museum -- somewhere that you can look but not touch.
Myth #3: I can stage the home myself. Probably not. Most people are just too entrenched in their homes to see them from a buyer's perspective. The door that squeaks or the chipping paint on the corners of the walls just blend into the background for you, but they won't to a buyer.
Myth #4: Staging a home is all well and good, but it doesn't affect the bottom line. Definitely untrue. Studies by HUD and others show repeatedly that staged homes bring, on average, 6% more than un-staged homes even in a down market! On a $200,000 home, that's $12,000! When people see a house that looks "nice" they attach an actual dollar value to that appearance. It's no different from when you're dressed nicely compared to when you're dressed in your sweats. If I go the mall dressed in a typical work outfit, people will try to help me because I look like I can afford to buy something. When I go in sweats, sales clerks tend to ignore me because I don't look like I'm likely to buy anything.
Over the coming weeks I'll be posting before/after photos of homes I've staged in Lexington and Central Kentucky and sharing more information about how they did on the market. I hope you enjoy my posts. Feel free to email or comment if you have a home staging question or topic you'd like to see addressed.
Sharon
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