The Deb Ward Team

Staging Your Home to Sell During the Holidays

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Staging your home inside and out this holiday season may mean the difference between selling your home before the New Year or waiting until after. Here are some staging ideas for your home this holiday season.

Staging Your Home to Sell During the HolidaysStaging your home means inside or out, your home must be clean! Outside, neaten up the yard, deck, porch and sidewalks. Weed and clean out planting beds. Prune trees and shrubs. Pack away bicycles, sports equipment, toys, and so forth and store them offsite. Inside, clean your home from top to bottom and declutter each room. Move excess furniture out of rooms. As you clean, inside and out, repair things that need it. Paint where necessary, caulk, and re-grout, spackle holes in walls and make things look new. Selling your home will depend on it being clean and repaired as well as staged.

Staging your home includes your garage and storage areas. Store anything you can off site. You want your yard, storage sheds, garage and closets/storage areas inside your home to be uncluttered and neat. The bigger they look the better. People buy space, especially storage space. If you are selling your home, just remember that you are going to have to pack and move anyway, so this will give you a head start.

It’s the holidays, so decorate. The key to staging with holiday decorations is to keep it tasteful. Don’t go nuts with lights and yard “ornaments” outside: no blow up Santas, snow globes or any other gaudy yard decorations. This is not the year to win the decoration contest in your neighborhood! Maybe lights on the shrubs, a wreath on the door. Another idea to make your home look attractively decorated is to find an old sled and dress it up with some greens and a bow and set it by the door. Festive, not gaudy.

Inside keep holiday decorations tasteful as well. A tree, maybe some greens on a fireplace mantel, decorated but not out of control. While Christmas and Hanukkah are religious holidays, keep these holiday decorations to a minimum. Yes, keeping true to your faith is important, but not everyone celebrates as you do.

Check on the web at places like HGTV or DIY Network for good ideas on how to decorate tastefully, but without going overly religious. Staging your home at the holidays is easy, just keep it tasteful and you’ll be selling your home in no time!

Staging Your Home Is Important, Even In A Sellers Market

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Staging your home is as important in a sellers’ market as it is in a buyers’ market. The same reasoning applies when selling real estate at any time or in any market. So let’s look at those reasons.

First, staging makes you declutter and organize your home. Cleaning and decluttering is the biggest part of staging. Depersonalizing the space is important so Staging Your Home Is Important, Even In A Sellers Marketthat buyers can imagine their things in the space. The easier you make it for them to see your home as theirs, the more likely you will be to get offers. You will be moving anyway, so packing up much of the daily clutter and personal items now will make moving later easier. Forces you to organize and get rid of clutter.

Staging increases the probability of a sale. Even in a sellers’ market, you home isn’t guaranteed to sell. Increase your chances by setting yourself and your home up to succeed. Staging not only increases that likelihood, but it decreases the time it will be on the market. Less time on the market means less aggravation in the showing process and a bigger probability you will get asking price or better as well.

Speaking of price, staging will justify that asking price. Clutter and dirt = turned off buyers who see a project home = lower offers. Staged home that looks clean, uncluttered and move in ready = happy buyers who want to pay your asking price to move in. In a sellers’ market it can equal a bidding war that boosts your profits.

You may be thinking that since the market has shifted in your favor as a seller that the amount of work you have to do to sell has disappeared. It really hasn’t. Being lazy won’t benefit you in the end. Go watch one of those HGTV® shows like Property Brothers to see the difference. Watch the buyers when they walk through the professionally staged “everything we want” homes, then their faces as they walk through the unstaged, cluttered or dirty ones. Listen to the reasoning on offers (“it needs work” and “its been on the market for X amount of time”) and see how it affects price. Don’t make those mistakes. Stage your home and walk away a winner.

The Deb Ward Team

Keller Williams Realty
30522 U.S. Highway 19 N, #107
Palm Harbor, FL 34684
Phone: 727-410-0336
Fax: 727-474-9069
Email: info@DeborahWard.com
The Deb Ward Team at Keller Williams Realty specializes in all of Pinellas County, Florida including: Clearwater, Palm Harbor, Dunedin, St. Petersburg, and the Gulf Beaches from Clearwater Beach down to St. Pete Beach serving buyers and sellers with a focus that is rarely found in the real estate world!