Once you decide to list your home, you might think your primary objective is to make it look appealing to prospective buyers. However, that’s actually not the right goal. Your goal isn’t simply to impress people with your home — it’s to help them see it as their home. This is where effective home staging comes in. Let’s look at five specific staging mistakes you should avoid like the plague.
1. Failing to Clean, Declutter and Touch Up
This point seems glaringly obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many sellers cut corners on basic cleaning and spruce-up tasks. Cluttered spaces create an instant bad impression and make people feel like they’ve intruded on your “lived-in” home. Dirty windows, “dust bunnies” on the floor and stained walls — these all convey to a buyer that you don’t care enough to clean or to impress them. And if you don’t care, why should they?
2. Too Much Décor
Don’t confuse showing your home with turning it into a show home. Leaning too heavily toward a decorating style like modern, industrial or country French will limit your audience. Likewise, filling your space with eye-popping details might land it a photo shoot in House Beautiful, but it will not bring you closer to selling because you are making it difficult for buyers to see their own furniture in the space. Remember, you are not trying to draw attention to the décor but to the home itself. Don’t make the decoration a distraction.
3. Over-personalizing
Over-personalizing your home can take many forms. It can be an overabundance of family photos, a stack of mail on the desk, repurposing a spare room for an exercise or storage space, a shade of paint only you and a handful other people would appreciate … the list goes on. Anything you leave out that identifies the home as distinctly yours makes it more difficult for a buyer to see it as distinctly theirs.
4. Overdoing “Neutral”
Yes, it is possible to “over-neutralize” a space. We are taught to avoid bold color schemes and dramatic details when staging, and that point is valid — but if you make everything too white, beige or light grey, you risk making the space invisible. Keep it mostly neutral, but don’t be afraid to add an accent here and there just to keep the eye interested.
5. Making it Too Sparse
Effective staging usually means removing a few unnecessary furniture pieces, but you can also err in the direction of leaving too few pieces. A single table and chair in an otherwise vacant room looks gratuitous – not lived-in. You might think you are creating the illusion of more space, but all you are doing is making it look barren and stark. Instead, try to create open walkways and a sense of flow through the home, keeping the furnishings tasteful yet unassuming.
If you are buying a home, Sotheby’s International Realty® has an augmented reality app called Curate that can help you visualize your own furniture in a home!
If you’re selling a home and need advice on how to avoid these and other staging mistakes, call Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby’s International Realty at 404.948.4812.