Should I stage my vacant home?
Yes, you should stage your vacant home. It is highly recommended that you hire a professional home stager to do this to save money, time, and effort. Since your house is empty, the challenge is to put furniture and appliances inside to create an image of a pleasant and comfortable home. Staging helps buyers imagine a life in your house so it is best to make it look uninhabitable without distracting them with your personal stuff.
Your professional home stagers can provide cheap and quality furniture and appliances resources that you can rent for a period. They can recommend stores that can give you discounts and places where you can find the best materials to use for your house. You must realize that home staging is the best and most practical way to go through with the selling process.
If you are not still convinced in staging a vacant home, ask yourself the following questions:
- Can my vacant place sell itself without a proper home staging?
One way to find out is to invite your friends over and ask for their honest opinions about the house. They will surely give reliable comments to assess for yourself. Or you may simply empathize with your buyers who will see your house online. Is it attractive enough to compete with other staged homes? If your answer is yes, which is by the way very unlikely to happen, then go and list your property online. If not, proceed to question No. 2.
- Can I do the staging alone?
No. You need to hire a professional home stager. These people are trained and well-educated when it comes to interior design. If you do this on your own, there is a chance that you might overlook simple things that can destroy the image of a house or screw up its best feature. Pros can give you fresher and likable ideas because they know what will please the buyers.
- Can I really sell my house faster?
Yes. Both the sellers’ and the buyers’ agents cite home staging as an effective way of selling a property faster. About 62% of agents believe that home staging decreases the time that it takes to sell a house. Therefore, most of the sellers’ agents, or about 93% of them, recommend home staging before putting it on the market [1]. The prettier your home can be, the more buyers it can attract.
Don’t be skeptical about trying new things, read more about home staging and its benefits here. The more you inform yourself about its importance, the more you will appreciate its application in your life especially when selling a property. The home staging process had long been used since the 1970’s and it has since then proved its reliability in the real estate industry. Remember that home staging is much more than making a house pleasant. It is a crucial process which can make or break an image of your house. Let go of all your emotional attachments with the house and be critical about every change that is going to happen. Lastly, always put yourself in the shoes of the buyer.