What is home-staging? It’s not a concept with which everyone in the capital is intimately familiar. Sometimes, property gets snapped up before home-staging has even been considered, let alone executed. But when it’s in place, home-staging can present a house or flat in its very best light and if interest has been sluggish, it can make it buoyant and help a struggling property to sell. It allows you to take a step back and view your home objectively, without sentimentality clouding your view and your judgment. Home-staging is all about that vital first impression and although it can take time and effort, it can not only aid with selling, it can also add value to your property. It eliminates the kind of clutter and scruffiness that can get in the way of a sale and it changes the game altogether. You can find out more about Ward Thomas’s London home-staging services here.
The main aim of home-staging is to make your home look the best it possibly can, showing off all its advantages and attributes while playing down its drawbacks. Chief among its aims is to turn your home into a place on which viewers can superimpose their own ideas and imagine inhabiting. Is their too much clutter or are there too many piles of magazines? Home-staging will address this. Do you have an excess of personal, family photographs on the walls and surfaces? Again, your home-staging practitioner will explain why that’s not a good idea. While some pieces of furniture can make a room seem larger, others actually get in the way and make it feel cramped. All of this means that a home seems too personalised and small for viewers to imagine living within.
If you’re attempting your own home-staging, be ruthless about removing clutter wherever you see it. Work out if there are pieces of furniture that should go into storage (or your attic) so that a room can breathe and grow.
After decluttering, mending and maintenance comes next – touching up paint or redoing it entirely so that your rooms have neutral colours instead of ones that are too strident or unusual. If anything’s peeling or visibly damaged, it needs remedying. You should cast just as beady an eye over your outside space, including front and back doors, porches, gardens etc. Cleanliness, tidiness and warmth of welcome are the vital things to keep in mind.
Your staging efforts may involve time and money but they’ll pay off because unlike some of the other properties in your street, yours won’t look tired, defeated, too lived-in and too visually tied to your own specific tastes. Evidence suggests, also, that home-staged properties end up selling for more money than those that are presented au natural.
