Home staging to sell quickly

You only get to make a first impression once! How many times have we all heard that? And nowhere is it truer than when you are listing your home for sale.
Most prospective buyers form their opinions about your home in the first 7-10 seconds.

To really impress visitors, I highly recommend home staging – more than cleaning and de-cluttering let the best features of your home become the focal point of each home visit. Staged homes generally sell at least twice as quickly as non-staged ones.

Top tips for selling your home in the fall and winter months:

• Keep your place warm – this is particularly true if the property is empty.
• Lighting is a key factor especially in a Montreal winter! Lighting acts as a welcoming beacon as potential buyers visit each room.
• Flowers – I can’t say enough about this. A splash of colour indoors with well placed plants and flowers in a home brings life to the property. My only caution is to use these as accents and not a jungle!
• If your home is vacant, a coat of fresh paint and the right rented furnishings can offset the costs of owning an empty property. Rooms tend to look smaller than they are when unfurnished.
• Do you have a lovely front or back yard that is hiding under the last snowfall – pepper photos of your outdoor deck, front yard in strategic areas so that every visitor can well imagine the home in its next season.

The advantages of investing in home staging are plentiful. The general rule of thumb is to spend about 1% of the value of your home on staging. The cost to you should be less than the average first price reduction of a property which sits on the market for too long.

Visitors need to be wowed in today’s buyer’s market. Homebuyers are more sophisticated and savvy than they used to be.