Stagers
How to make a crowded house look more appealing
Oct 2001
We are going to be selling our house and looking for a bigger one. I
would
love some advice from those who have sold houses before as to how to
deal
with making the house look more appealing for sale. I have read articles
about staging a home - I'm not looking for how to stage our home per se.
I'm
really asking for something more basic about logistics: our house is
very
crowded in all the rooms except my daughter's. We have no place to put
any of
the stuff as the garage is already full (see why we're moving?!?!!).
Logistically speaking, how does all of this happen? I have gone to many
open
houses. The houses are never cluttered and I always wonder where all
their
stuff is (though of course, they could just be neat). Do you have to get
move
the stuff just for a broker's open house and then once more for a
regular
folks' open house or do you have to get rid of the stuff longer term?
The
only reason our place is cluttered is as our daughter got older, her
stuff
got bigger. And we just all have too much stuff. While we can work on
getting
rid of stuff we don't need, most of this stuff is stuff we need, but
simply
don't have a good place for. Thanks in advance - we have never been in
the position before, obviously. This is our first home.
In reply to the person selling their home. As someone who has just
sold our home, our advise to you regarding clutter is just to bite the
bullet and rent a storage space to store it in until you move. Our
realtor advised us not to "stage" the house but just to remove about
half of our belongings. It really made a difference. We saw many open
houses that looked staged, and it really just seems so artificial to
us...like you're living at Williams Sonoma or something. Our first
open house was supposed to be the Sunday after 9/11. We put it off a
week to assess the impact of the attacks on the real estate market. We
had 2 successive open houses the following 2 Sundays and had several
offers the next Tuesday to choose from and accepted one $30K over the
asking price! I'm convinced our house was so well received due in
large part because we removed half of the clutter that normally we
don't think twice about. My wife and I are not normally super neat and
with 2 small children, it's hard to keep toys and such off the floors
and clutter off the counters and shelves, but we did it. We had a full
basement to store most of our stuff in, but would have rented a space
if we had to. Believe me, you'll more than recoup the cost of the
rental and you'll get a head start on packing. A cluttered house will
not show well. By the way, any good realtor worth his/her salt will
advise you to do the same. Ours, Nacio Brown at Templeton Leverette
(our old house at 934 Delaware is featured on his website,
www.myberkeleyhome.com ) gave us many good recommendations that
resulted in a quick sale for substantially more than the asking price
directly following the worst terrorist attack in our nation's
history. We couldn't have asked for better. Good luck.
-Rob
I think it would be worth it for you to pack up a lot of stuff and put
it in storage (away from the house) while you show the house, even if
you don't have it staged. It seems like everyone stages their home
these days, and I've heard that cosmetic details like newly done
floors, having home painted, and putting in nice plantings in the
yard, can make a big difference in the amount of money you can get for
a house. A friend of mine sold their house about a year ago without a
realtor. They had the windows cleaned professionally also. It made a
big difference in how the house looked.
-Andrea
A good agent should be able to advise you on what
needs to be done to prepare your house for sale in
this market. A house that is clutter free, staged,
freshly painted (if needed) and of course priced
appropriately will attract more buyers and sell more
quickly than one that is not. If you don't have
storage space in your garage/basement then renting
storage space would be the best option. It takes a
lot of work to put a house on the market, you want it
to look as attractive as possible to prospective
buyers so that it will sell quickly. The longer it
stays on the market the more likely it is that any
offer will be below your asking price.
-Mary
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