If you’re ready to invest in a more relaxing and leisurely lifestyle, you may be considering a move to a sophisticated retirement community like Friendship Village of Bloomington. Communities like ours offer an enriching social environment, refined amenities, elegant floor plans, and the chance to live an independent and fulfilling life.
t’s exciting to start a new adventure, but you’ll want to ensure you have successfully sold your home before transitioning to your new residence.
While the prospect of attracting the perfect buyer for your home may feel daunting, staging your home ahead of its listing can save you time and perhaps increase your original selling price. Here are five suggestions on how to successfully stage your home for a (hopefully!) faster sale.
Why Staging Your Home is Essential
Just like a director stages a play or movie to tell a story, you will want to stage your home to tell the right story, too. Potential buyers should step into your home and instantly feel like it is where they will enjoy many new experiences and formulate cherished memories.
Staging your home can also add to its perceived value. Many homeowners have found they can increase their selling price by 5-10 percent with a modest investment in home staging. This process can include rearranging furniture, repainting, redecorating or even renting furniture pieces that enhance your home’s character.
Tips for Staging Your Home For Sale
It may be difficult to imagine leaving a home you’ve spent decades in, but consider this an opportunity to inspire the same love of your space for potential buyers. After all, they’re looking for a new adventure, too.
Help potential buyers see your home as the perfect place to live by appealing to their senses, not just with cleaning and decluttering but also their senses of smell and touch. Consider hiring a professional staging company to create a charming design for your home.
Together, you can collaborate on new ways to use your existing furniture, natural lighting, fresh paint and textures to present an inviting, open and spacious feel.
1. Focus on Essential Maintenance, Finishes and Deep Cleaning
It’s critical that your home appears fresh, welcoming and well-maintained. Eagle-eyed buyers will be inspecting every part of your home – under sinks, cabinet shelves, medicine cabinets, closets, garage, attic and more. A professional service can deep-clean your home, even in those hard-to-reach areas. That said, be sure that you put most of your focus into those rooms that buyers prize most. This includes the kitchen, master bedroom, and bathrooms.
Focus on both essential maintenance tasks, such as touching up paint and refinishing floors, as well as investments in moderate finishes. Today’s buyers are more demanding than ever, and fresh finishes can give your home an advantage.
2. Declutter, Streamline and Simplify
Living in a home for many years can lead to an accumulation of personal treasures, antiques, and family heirlooms. This can cause unintentional clutter, making your home feel smaller than it truly is.
Consider donating, storing or giving away items to family members that don’t need to be displayed in the staging process. Other items that tend to become untethered from where they belong include books, mail, magazines and DVD collections. Place items in neat stacks or tucked away into the appropriate place. Also check that your closets are well-organized. A professional organizer can help you pare down items and stage the area so that buyers can envision their own belongings within.
3. Artfully Arrange Furniture
Feng shui is the practice and philosophy of arranging one’s living space in order to create balance. You can use this principle in home staging. For instance, by moving a large sofa from the middle of a room to a corner, which can improve the flow of the space.
Utilize the natural lighting and wall colors of each room. For example, natural light paired with trending color tones: beige, taupe, ivory or gray can make your room feel more spacious. Consult a professional painting service to see which color palettes can create the illusion of a bigger room.
4. De-Personalize the Space
Potential homebuyers want to imagine themselves in your space and make it their own. To encourage this visualization, pack up or tuck away personal items such as family pictures, toiletries and pet toys.
It can be difficult, but according to Michelle Vassey, a home staging professional with over thirty years of experience, “This house isn’t for you anymore. It’s for the next set of people. What you’re giving them is a glimpse of how the home could be lived in, not how the home is being lived in at the time.”
5. Add Fresh Fragrances
Just as staging your furniture and removing personal items can help buyers envision themselves in a space, so too can the way the space smells. Delight your potential buyers with warm, enticing scents.
Have freshly baked cookies in the kitchen or put a few drops of cinnamon, lavender, or essential oils boiling on the stove. These pleasant fragrances create a cozy feeling in your home.
Speak with a Move-in Coordinator at Friendship Village of Bloomington
Once a potential buyer has been found and your home has successfully been sold, you will be free to enjoy your new, upscale retirement lifestyle.
At Friendship of Village of Bloomington, an elegant retirement community in Minnesota, we offer exclusive amenities, world-class dining, hospitable staff and like-minded peers to help enrich your social life. Contact us to learn more or schedule a tour to experience our community for yourself.
