First Impressions: Home Staging Key to Selling
Friday, June 25, 2010
If your home is on the market and your last open house fizzled as far as interested buyers were concerned, you might want to look into the services of a professional home stager. If that's not in the budget, at least you can learn about how staging your home for a sale is of great importance. First impression is the key to a sale, especially in a tough real estate market.
Professional home stagers are practiced in the art of preparing a home for resale. They work to eliminate clutter, edit and arrange furniture, and even assist in enhancing curb-appeal.
Elise Vetri is a Realtor and Accredited Staging Professional with Keller Williams in Lincoln, Rhode Island. She feels that staging has not "caught on" in Rhode Island yet, although she stages each home inside and out prior to listing and marketing.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST"As a buyer’s agent, I have seen my buyer’s eyes light up when viewing a home that is clean, bright, neutral, and hence, inviting. Picture a buyer who has looked at twenty homes, for example with pet smells, cooking odors, loud walls, busy wallpaper, disorganized furniture, and overly accessorized," Elise says. "Now imagine amongst all of these homes is a staged one. It becomes a “sight for sore eyes” and as a result, the one that the buyers want. The keyword here is buyers because a staged home can bring in multiple buyers even in slow markets. In fact, Rhode Islanders have an opportunity like nowhere else in the country because it is a market where staging is the exception and not the norm, like it is elsewhere, so it is very easy and to stand out from the competition."
Vetri advises that all homes be staged as this can make the difference of even selling the property. That's aside from the fact that it may sell for more money.
What is involved in the process of staging? Elise Vetri earned her Accredited Staging Professional (ASP) designation with Barb Schwarz, the creator of Home Staging™ in 2004. She says staging involves simple ideas that neutralize the property. Vetri says that this includes painting walls with neutral colors that are warm and relevant to today’s tastes, cleaning up dirty ceilings, replacing worn or moldy grout in the bathrooms, cleaning or painting kitchen cabinets, replacing knobs for a more modern look, cleaning and deodorizing carpeting, and polishing wood floors.
Removing clutter is another aspect of the staging process. Removing excess items, clearing counters and cleaning out closets is essential.
The results that come with professionally staging your home prior to putting it on the market are, according to Elise Vetri, "nothing short of amazing and many times the sellers cannot believe they are looking at their own house."
If you have more questions on staging your home, you can find Elise Vetri on Facebook, contact her via email, or find her on Twitter.
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