Getting that dream offer when selling your home takes more than simply cleaning it up and letting buyers scrutinize every minute detail. To better prepare your home for a quick and easy time on the local market, let’s look into some color schemes and staging tips for home sellers in VA, MD, WV, D.C & FL.
Declutter
Often, the very first step of preparing your property for sale is deep cleaning everything.
While this is certainly a spectacular place to start, it needs to be paired with some serious decluttering. Decluttering is the process of removing any unnecessary or obtrusive furniture and items from the living areas in order to create a better overall look with improved traffic flow. This also includes storage areas, such as basements and closets.
For storage areas, empty everything out and separate the items into two equal piles: keep and don’t keep. This ensures only half of those items will return to their original storage space while the remaining half is donated, thrown away, or put in a different storage space.
If you have a lot of items in storage, it may be helpful to temporarily rent a storage unit to assist with the decluttering process.
Depersonalize
With our living spaces decluttered, we next need to address removing the “you” from the home.
When potential buyers are touring your home, you want them to be undistracted in order to provide the perfect opportunity for them to imagine what they would do with the available living space, and what it might look like. Having family photos and keepsakes around can distract your buyers, and could cost you an offer or two.
Depersonalization helps refocus all buyer’s attention directly on the property itself and is one of the top staging tips that leads to more excited and motivated buyers.
The Tried and True Color Option
The color palette recommendation you will hear time and again is to go neutral and don’t look back.
The theory behind leaning heavily on neutral tones is that they create a blank canvas for the buyer to decorate how they see fit. It goes back to the idea of depersonalization and giving your potential buyers some breathing room to envision what they would do with the property.
Oftentimes, homeowners think this means they are locked into using some shade of white, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Every base color can have a neutral tone created by professionals mixing colors together. Picking which neutral color works best for your property is a matter of perusing your local hardware store and comparing color swatches of your favorites back at home.
Embrace Trendy Color Schemes
Selecting individual neutral tones to coat the majority of a room is the starting point for repainting to sell.
Deciding on additional neutral tones to accent trim, molding, and other smaller details can add the layer of polish a room has been lacking. The current market trends toward monochrome color schemes and a warm or cool gray accented by a neutral white.
Talk it over with a paint professional if you’re feeling stuck, and don’t feel the need to keep things as basic as possible.
How Does All of This Help?
Selling a home is certainly about the details of a listing.
However, it’s just as much about giving buyers reasons to get excited about the prospect of purchasing your property, and then time to let that anticipation and excitement build.
Staging your home with appropriate colors and decor helps create an organized, cohesive package that is hopefully appealing to the buyer. By doing so, your staged home market value will absolutely benefit, and you’ll ideally end up juggling competing offers.
Staging Tips and Guidance from the Pros
If you’re looking for more staging tips when selling your home in VA, MD, WV, D.C & FL, contact us today at 703-782-4422!