Beginning the journey of selling your home can be incredibly daunting, especially if it’s the house you’ve called home for years. To ensure that your house can become a home for its subsequent owners, staging it makes all the difference in making that happen.

Even in a seller’s market, making your home stand out against the others on the market can be a difficult task, and this is why home staging aids in attracting potential buyers and solidifying a good impression, ultimately saving you time and money. Here’s precisely how staging your home changes the outcome of the sale and why depersonalizing your home is crucial to reap the benefits of staging.

Staging your home comprises a partial or complete redécor to enhance the house's existing positive features. Typically rooms that significantly impact buyers, such as living rooms, multi-functional spaces, and bedrooms, will be newly filled with aesthetically pleasing and neutral décor, furniture, and layout. These interior decorating and design changes capitalize off the home's existing space to fully demonstrate its potential while keeping it neutral enough that potential buyers genuinely see it as “theirs.”

Successful staging helps sellers meet the objectives of showing off the home’s best features while minimizing any apparent flaws, ultimately creating a home that could belong to anybody, and in this case, future buyers.

When debating whether or not staging your home is an investment worth making, it’s vital to consult data findings and statistics regarding the efficacy of staging. According to the NAR’s 2021 Profile of Home Staging Report, 47% of buyers’ agents reported that home staging positively affected buyers, with these values quickly establishing the everpresent impact staging can have on a sale.

Even more interestingly, staging your home with the most up-to-date interior design trends will save you both time and money throughout your sale. To begin, homes where one percent of the asking price was invested into specialized professional staging, saw an overall return investment of 5%-15%. Moreover, staging your home can increase the sale price by up to 30%, with both of these findings demonstrating the potential monetary gain deriving from an investment in home staging.

Regarding saving time, staged homes sell anywhere from three to 30 times faster than unstaged homes. But what about staging your home results in such evident quantitative disparities between staging versus not staging?

With all these established findings and statistics, and having laid the foundation for what staging is, understanding its particular importance is vital in navigating the selling of your home. One of the most important goals of staging is creating a space where potential buyers can form an emotional connection to the home because, for many, buying a house is one of the most significant purchases ever made as it sets the scene for the following months, years, and decades of their lives. With that said, the best way a home can be sold is to turn it into a place people can envision themselves living.

Creating a blank canvas out of your home by redecorating may seem counterintuitive. Still, in reality, the addition of carefully selected color palettes, wall decor, and furniture arrangements are highly inviting to potential buyers. Contrastingly, an unstaged home with no furniture or decor inside does not create an emotionally connective environment, whereas meticulously personalized staging does. Solidifying this notion, the NAR found that 82% of buyers’ agents reported that staging the property made it easier for the buyers to visualize themselves living there.

Another significant factor in whether potential buyers can envision themselves in the home is the move-in-ready appearance afforded by staging your home. Staging assists in bringing all the elements of your home in a clean, posh, and comfortable way, and if this goal is achieved, as it is with successful staging, the buyers won’t be put off by seemingly numerous amounts of things to fix within the house.

Solving little problems, such as cracked paint or stained carpet, keeps buyers from writing off the home due to an array of mini-projects they feel they’d have to fix themselves. In addition, each flaw not covered during staging is a deduction of their offering price, losing the seller money while putting their home up for sale.

In general, clutter and unnecessary personal items distract from the home's features and can even make the space look smaller due to perceived ineffective methods of storing or organizing your things; unfortunately, what might work for you might come across as a flaw to potential buyers. Removing personal items and clutter has the potential to increase perceived home value as buyers focus on accentuating positive features of the home, allowing them to visualize how the space could cater to their needs. This ultimately drives the inarguably vital emotional connection between the buyer and the home.

Similarly, an increased perceived value translates to screens and photos as well, with these staging benefits impacting how well a home can make a first impression before potential buyers have even seen the house in person. Almost all millennial home buyers, 99%, began their house-purchasing journey by consulting online sites of current home listings.

Once you decide to sell your home, it’s of the utmost importance to put your trust in Real Estate Agents such as the Crystal + Carr Team. Having the support of experienced and knowledgeable Portsmouth real estate agents will ensure your home’s interior design and decor suits what sellers are currently searching for in the market. Moreover, working with the Crystal + Carr Team will save you time, money, and hassle throughout the selling process. Contact them today to start the process of selling your home and take advantage of their experience.