Follow these tips when preparing your home for sale:
- Stage each living area to help potential buyers imagine living in that space.Home staging is basically cleaning your home and rearranging the furniture (or renting furniture if it’s empty) so your home looks like a showroom. A professional home stager sees your home from a buyer’s perspective and understands how to highlight its strengths and soften its flaws, and a photographer can make it all look brilliant in your listing.
But not everyone has the money for professional staging and photography. Here are a few tips for DIYing it:
- Pick neutral colors for walls, decor, and furniture
- Let in all the natural light you can
- Leave just enough furniture in each room to make it look functional and roomy
- Deep clean everything
- Take photographs with as much light as possible
- Invest in a wide angle lens for great photos
- Take high-resolution images—a camera will typically take higher resolution photos than your phone.
- Edit the photos. Brighten them up and crop them so every room is straight and beautifully centered.
- Take horizontal photos. They look better in online listings.
- Keep all rooms clean, including children rooms.
- Remove clutter and extra furniture to help the space feel clean and larger. Your home will look bigger and its best features will stand out best when there is the least amount of stuff in it. Plus, storage space is a big selling point for buyers, and the less of your stuff they see in the closets, the bigger your storage spaces will look. Now’s the time to go through all of your stuff and donate, give away, or trash anything you don’t love or need. And decluttering now will reduce the amount of stuff you have to move when it’s time to go.
