10 Foolproof Tips to Successful Stage Your Home

With so many Minneapolis homes for sale, you need yours to stand out from the crowd. You want to secure the best offer and enjoy a healthy return on your investment. You'll need to get your home ready to sell before you list it on the market and begin to attract buyers.

As part of the process to get your home ready, you'll probably hear a lot about staging your home. This can be confusing if you've never sold a home before, or it's been a while. You need a helping hand to know which direction to go with staging your space, so you attract the most buyers.

This guide offers 10 foolproof tips for successfully staging your home to attract the right buyers:

Before you can successfully stage your and entice buyers, you need to understand home staging and the goals. Home staging is the process of preparing your home for sale with the idea of creating a space that appeals to the largest number of prospective buyers.

It can include repainting your home, renting furniture, and adding or removing decor. You want the potential buyers to imagine themselves living their best lives in your home. Essentially, you're selling a lifestyle in your home.

Potential buyers aren't going to buy your home if they don't want to go inside. The first impression of your home starts with the outside of your house. This is where you need to begin staging. You want to up the wow factor in the exterior of your property.

A great place to start is hiring someone to pressure wash your home and clean all the outside windows. You also need to make sure your gutters are clean, and there aren't leaves on your roof.

This is a great time to repaint your front door or replace it with one with glass panels. You want the potential buyers to be excited when they pull into the driveway of your home.

Everyone needs a place of their own to unwind and relax. For home buyers, this is almost always the master bedroom. You want to create a luxurious and beautiful space where someone can retreat after a long day.

You want to add a thick, plush rug, and use a decadent duvet on the bed with plump throw pillows. The duvet needs to be a solid, neutral color. You can use the throw pillows to introduce warm colors, minimalistic patterns, and textures.

When you're done staging the master bedroom, it should like you're stepping into an upscale hotel room. If you need ideas, you can always Google a few high-end hotels and review their photos for suggestions.

From the walk-in closet in the master bedroom to the cabinet in the laundry, potential buyers want to see a lot of space. While your cabinets, closets, and drawers might be large, they don't appear that way if they're filled to the brim.

Prospective buyers will open your kitchen cabinets, bathroom drawers, and look inside your closets. You want them to appear massive. You can achieve this illusion of excess storage space by taking away at least half of the items in these spaces.

If you need to, you can rent a storage space to have room for these items until you have a contract in place. The items left in these spaces need to be neatly organized.

Your pets are an essential part of your family, but the truth is, they can cause calamity and mayhem in a home. During the staging process, you need to eliminate signs of them. This might mean removing cat condos and storing dog beds.

You also want to repair any damage they've caused to your home, such as baseboards or screens. It's also important to get rid of any odor. You probably don't smell it anymore, but there can be unpleasant scents in the air. It's a good idea to get the carpets cleaned by a professional service.

After you list your home, you need to make arrangements for your pets to stay with a friend or neighbor until there's an offer. Your veterinarian's office might be able to board them for the duration as well.

In the past few years, working from home has become part of the culture, and home buyers are keeping an eye on available home office space. If you already have a study or home office, great, but if you don't you'll want to develop one.

This might mean adding a desk with a laptop into a nook in the family living area or repurposing your guest bedroom as a home office. You don't need to buy expensive office furniture because you can almost always rent what you need for a few weeks. 

As you stage your home, you want to highlight the space available in each room. If you have large pieces of furniture or too many, the space feels smaller and crowded. You need to remove these pieces and store them during the duration of the home buying process.

In some cases, all of your pieces are expansive or the room looks empty, which is also a bad idea. There are companies that can lease you furniture to help you create the right look in your home. Your real estate agent can help you decide on the pieces to store and the ones to rent as well.

When potential buyers visit your home, your kitchen can make the difference in receiving an offer or not getting one. You want to focus your energy on making the space engaging and welcoming.

You might be tempted to remodel the space, but this is an unnecessary expense, and you won't realize the full costs of it. However, there are small, inexpensive changes you can make.

Clear off all the counters and add a couple of small pieces, such as a stand mixer or a vase with fresh flowers. You can restain the cabinets or paint them to refresh the look. Another popular choice is replacing the hardware, including knobs and handles on the drawers and cabinets.

After the kitchen, the bathrooms are the next big selling point in your home. Staging your bathroom begins with a next-level deep clean. If you have hard water stains, you need to put in the elbow grease to get rid of them.

If there are stains on your grout or between tiles, you need to use a stain remover to clear them. You don't want prospective buyers to think that there might be a mold and mildew issue.

Once your bathroom sparkles, it's time to create a spa effect. Use fluffy, white towels and minimize other items. You can add candles and apothecary jars to complete the look.

When an agent shows your home, they want the prospective buyers to picture their life in the space, and photos of your children make this more difficult. You might love hand-sewn quilts or have a collection of signs from Irish pubs. Whatever it is that you've used to personalize your home it's time to remove it.

You need to replace these items with more generic items and wall hangings. Your home should be a blank canvas, so prospective buyers can more easily see their own belongings in the space. This will help you get an offer and sell your home.

What does your home smell like? It might be the rich pasta sauce you made last night or years of pet dander. Now, it's time to infuse some pleasant scents into your home. You can do this in a variety of ways. From scented candles to aerosol sprays, you can freshen the air in your home. Another popular addition is fresh flowers with a heavy scent. Flowers can add beauty, color, and a lovely fragrance to any room in your home.

When you select a real estate agent, they can make further suggestions for staging your home. They should understand the nuances of the local real estate market and what changes will garner the most attention from prospective buyers.

Isaac Kuehn and his team are pros at selling homes in the Minneapolis real estate market. Once you allow them to list your home, they'll spring into action, getting it on the market and finding the ideal buyer for your home. Learn more and contact our team today.