So what does staging your home to sell quickly mean exactly? In a nutshell it is all about preparing your home in the best light possible to make a great first impression from kerb to door and beyond. A staged home showcases your home’s best features, and impresses your buyers, and helps them to imagine themselves living there. When your home is staged well, you will sell quickly and at the best price you can achieve. If you think hat ‘staging’ sounds a bit, well, contrived, think instead of giving your home style! In the following sections, we’ll outline to you a number of suggestions that can help you to do exactly that.
If you need help with some of these suggestions, we have a number of professionals at our disposal that can help take some of the strain – see our suggested addons/upgrades at the foot of this article.
A clean home
It’s a little bit psychological, but a clean home gives the impression (hopefully a genuine one) that your home is cared for and well maintained.
Make sure that everywhere is spotlessly clean, floors, walls (no dirty marks), ceilings, fan blades, windows, furniture, kitchen appliances, everything!
Maybe to achieve this degree of thoroughness is going to take some time, but it will be time well spent, and once done, you need to maintain it whilstsoever your home is on the market. It needs to be ready to be viewed at short notice!
Odours
Of course part of cleaning your home is to make sure it smells clean and fresh too. However, don’t simply load your home with multiple air fresheners. Other people may not appreciate your choice of fragrance, or they may feel that you are trying to mask something (drains?) or they may trigger allergic responses. Natural ways to enhance the air quality in your home include plants, flowers, fresh herbs, and of course opening the window. You might also use a light spray of essential oils (a few drops) mixed with water. If you are a smoker, refrain from smoking inside whilst your home is available for viewings. Avoid cooking strong smelling foods.
If you would like us to arrange a full house clean for you you can read more about our home clean service by clicking the image. Prices shown are indicative. Use voucher code CLEANQUOTE at the checkout to get a no obligation quotation.
Depersonalise
Visitors to your property need to be able to imagine themselves living there. They don’t want to be reminded that they are intruding into a family home, so remove all family photos and nic-nacs (and don’t forget the fridge magnets) and leave only the bare minimum such as wall art (bit make sure any artwork fits in with the decor) to make your viewers feel more at ease.
Neutral Decor
Remember that not everyone will have the same taste in decor, so if you’ve got pink, purple or some other bold colours in your home decor, it’s probably time to remove your ‘stamp’ on the property and present it as a blank canvas where prospective buyers can imagine what they could do with it.
Most professionals involved in staging a home will advocate the use of neutral, light colours.
The added benefit of using a lighter pallette will give a feeling of light, cleanliness and space – particularly important for those smaller and darker nooks and crannies.
Few of the properties here in Spain tend to have wallpapers, but if you do, consider removing rather than painting over.
If you would like one of our home decoration partners to visit and quote for decorating one or more rooms/areas of your home, add the item to the basket and use voucher code DECORQUOTE at the checkout.
Remove clutter and depersonalise
Most homes in Spain offered for resale are sold complete with furniture, so at least this should remain on view.
Mostly everything else might be considered clutter, particularly if you have lots of ornaments or similar. If there is too much to look at, potential buyers can find it distracting and may prevent them from seeing and remembering the main features of the property.
A house, and rooms full of stuff can also serve to make the place look smaller than it actually is.
Bedrooms
Our top tip is to buy a sealable plastic crate which could easily fit in the bottom of a wardrobe and use these to declutter your bedrooms, particularly prior to a viewing. This tip can also be applied to the storage of items from other rooms too!
Place all your shoes, slippers, washing, phone chargers, cosmetics and anything else you may have out on the surfaces in the crate.
If your wardrobes are packed to bulging with clothes, use another crate or a vac pac bag to remove your winter clothing or summer clothing depending on the season so that at least prospective viewers can see how roomy the storage is. Viewers will open wardrobes particularly if they are of the built in variety.
Bathrooms
Remove all childrens toys and other miscellaneous items from view. This also includes toothbrushes, tooth paste and other bathroom goods.
The only thing on show in your bathroom should be fresh new hand soap (a liquid soap is a clean hygenic way) and fresh clean fluffy towels.
Don’t cram all of this into your bathroom storage cupboards (find somewhere else!).
Kitchen
Remove all appliances that are not built in from work surfaces (with perhaps the exception of a coffee machine if you intend to have coffee ready to offer viewers!). Also remove any utensils. Your work surfaces should be free of any items.
Remove items from tops of cupboards as this can make the ceiling seem lower and so less open and airy and so small – this should really help with the smaller kitchen.
Remove any fridge magnets or notes.
Clean all appliances thoroughly inside and out.
Lighting
Ensure that all your lighting is working.
Replace any mismatched bulbs – that is all of the same wattage (and the highest the fitting will allow) and same colour temperature.
Dust any light bulbs, and clean any blades on fans. Clean all switches.
If you have a room that doesn’t get particularly good light, try supplementing it with a lamp.
Open all window blinds to let the light in, and perhaps open the window to allow air flow (or turn the air conditioning on prior to your viewing particularly if it is hot! Don’t use floor standing fans, they take up too much room, it’s better to have natural airflow.)
Leaving doors open between rooms can also allow light in from other sources, helps with the airflow, and may help to enhance the feeling of the size of the room.
Defined spaces
If you describe your home as 3 bedroom but have been using the smallest room as an office or hobby area you should think carefully about how to present this room. If you state a bedroom, it needs to be staged as such. Buyers will have difficulty imagining a space as a bedroom, they may not be able to estimate how bedroom furniture would fit in. So, it’s time to pack up your office and define that space.
Similarly in other spaces of your home, don’t have your home office in your living room, this might be convenient for you but it simply serves to make your living space look smaller.
Make sure that any space within a room is used well to show off in the best possible light.
Outside spaces
Considering the excellent climate we enjoy most of the year in Spain, we spend an awful lot of time outdoors. So it is important not to neglect your outside spaces no matter how small.
Remove any rubbish, junk, dead plants. Replace old worn and faded furniture, parasols and toldos.
For many, the garden and outside areas are often the first thing viewers will see, and those first impressions really count.
Make sure all your outside walls and balustrades are all freshly painted. And if necessary have your patio areas jet washed. Remove weeds, add plants with some nice colours where possible.
If you’d like your garden sprucing up, or your patio areas jet washing, you can arrange a quotation through us.
YouTube is a great place to go searching for tips, and you’ll find plenty on staging your home, here’s a good one presented by Micheal Shuster which is really clear and well thought out, many of his points we’ve already written about.
