Five Home Staging Myths

Are you selling your home?  You are obviously still the owner until the house sells, but when it is listed, it becomes "inventory" and should be viewed as a house and not a home.  You've probably heard about staging your home to make it more attractive to buyers.  There are professional home stagers in San Antonio you can hire, and even if you don't hire a pro, you can get great staging hints from your Realtor.  But today we'll talk about the 5 biggest myths surrounding staging a home for sale.

• I don't need to stage my home, buyers can see past my stuff.  Actually, NO they can't.  Most buyers cannot imagine their stuff in a home that is cluttered with the seller's possessions.  We tell our sellers that every box of clutter they remove from the home puts $$ back into their pockets at closing.

• The original (and expensive) features of my home add value.  Those 30 year old drapes and 20 year old wallpapers do not add value to today's buyers.  If a home is not vintage, meaning it is less than 50 years old, and it has not been updated, then the buyers won't pay for dated fixtures, even if they were expensive "in their day".
• My home isn't expensive enough to pay for staging. On the contrary, all homes need to present themselves in the best way possible. Take a look at your competition in the price bracket, and figure out what you need to do to make your home stand out. Staging can be just as important in a smaller home as it is in a larger home.
• Empty rooms look bigger.  Not usually!  When you are trying to sell an empty home, it is very hard to help buyers see how a room is used, and what fits in that room.  A few rented or borrowed pieces of furniture can define a space for the buyer.  Conversely, in a really large open room, buyers can sometimes have a problem when a room is empty because the room looks TOO large!
• "It's really a bedroom, but we're using it as a gym."  If it's a three bedroom home, but only two rooms have beds, buyers will sometimes question whether the third room would work as a bedroom or not.  For the sake of the time you have your home on the market, put the gym out in the garage, and give the bedroom it's real purpose. 

Buyers need to be able to picture themselves living in your home, so the house needs to look like they could bring all their stuff and move right in.  Staging simply means improving your home's appearance in order to appeal to the widest segment of the potential buyers.  The way you decorate your home to SELL may be quite different from the way you decorate to DWELL!