denver real estate Archives | Page 2 of 4

Home staging is critical when creating a home buyer experience

This week I’m talking about home staging. And last week I shared Updates and Repairs that get Top Dollar for Sellers. All with speed and execution in mind! 💪So here we go!

Once you have completed your updates, it’s time to think about how to stage your home to enhance it’s strengths. The best way to create this is to let your updates set the tone for the look and feel you want to achieve. Especially since staging is the cheapest thing a Seller can do to their home!

What Is Home Staging?

Staging your home is cheap. It's the best return on your time.

In its simplest from staging is taking things that you already have, and organizing them in a way that accentuates your house. It creates the ideal flow for buyers walking through your home. Staging allows buyers to see themselves living in your home and takes the focus off your personal belongings.

Creating the Home Buyer Experience

In previous posts, I’ve shared the importance of creating a Home Buyer Experience specifically designed for the ideal Buyer you are targeting. Creating an experience will allow Buyers to walk into your house excited for what’s to come so they can easily say “YES” and move forward with an offer.

Minimizing the Space

From a staging perspective, creating this experience starts by minimizing the space and accentuating the strengths of your home. Have you ever noticed when there’s a lot of clutter in a home? It’s really hard to no get distracted, right? When you minimize space with staging it allows buyers to see the strengths of the property first, then personal belongings second.

Give Buyers SOME of Your Story

I encourage all sellers to stage their home in a way that shares a part of who they are. It allows the buyer to get a piece of your story so they can connect to a part of you and your personality. This can be a certain style of artwork you like or a sports team that you are passionate about. Don’t go too far creating a sterile environment. And don’t give too much of your story! Sharing a little bit of who you is a good thing. Too much is overwhelming 😉

Let it Flow

The last part of home staging I want to cover is creating space in your house where things flow from room to room. Ideally, we want buyers walking from room to room efficiently and not walking around furniture or chairs.

By minimizing space, you’re creating flow from room to room. And with each space minimized it allow buyers to see the strengths of your property. While giving them a little piece of the story to connect to you as the seller.

Enhancing Your Home

Next, let’s talk about enhancing your property. Here’s the best way to think about it…imagine walking into a dark room. How do you feel when you walk in? Versus walking into a room that’s fully lit up all lights on and you’re able to see everything? It’s a very different experience. And that’s what enhancing your home is all about.

Lighting is Key

As I stated above, lighting is important. I encourage all sellers to purchase LEDs and change out light bulbs to make all the rooms pop. Plus LEDs are super energy efficient, so you’re able to leave them on all day long for weekend showings or days when you can’t come back home to prep your home.

Add Pops of Color

Color provides contrast and adds to the overall Home Buyer Experience. It can be flowers on the front or back porch. Or adding color throughout your house by placing designer items on the kitchen countertop, dining room table, or island. Whatever space needs color add it, that will bring life and enhance those spaces.

Smells. Really?

This one is interesting. So hear me out. Think of it this way…if you’ve ever been to a new home community like D.R. Horton or any builders out there what are they typically doing? They’re baking cookies, leaving food out, even hot chocolate on a cold day. It’s all about smells of home.

The same is true with you, smell allows your property to feel like home for buyers. To do this you can go as far as baking cookies and leaving them out for showings. Or simply putting fresh cut flowers out in your kitchen.

Adapt to Sell

The last topic I would like to cover is adapting to feedback. This is feedback for me your real estate agent, feedback from your friends, and people touring your home. It can be anyone who understands design and flow.

Staging means we are minimizing space and enhancing it. Then getting feedback from others. Ultimately when your home is on the market you’ll be getting feedback from actual buyers. So being able to adapt early on in the process allows you to rapidly respond to feedback from potential buyers if it’s not selling in the first few weeks.

Home staging is a process. Get feedback and continue to adapt until your home is sold.

Home Staging Recap

Just want to recap, staging your home is super cheap. It’s inexpensive because it only requires time and effort. And by packing things up, minimizing spaces and enhancing you will be able to quickly adapt to feedback that you’re getting from the market.

Most importantly, you are creating an experience for the home buyer walking through your house. And as I have shared before, if you create an experience targeting the buyer that you want to purchase your house they are going to walk into your home excited and say “YES” by writing an offer.

Let me know if you have any questions! This is something that I specialize in and would be more than happy to come by and give you staging advice. Or even talk about what’s possible within your house.

Hate Staging? I Have Someone

For anyone out there that does not like staging, and don’t want to mess with it, let me know! I can refer you to professional designers, and home stages that can actually take care of all of it for you.

It will allow you to focus on packing everything up and get 100% moved out. My stagers will deliver furniture and interior decor and will handle all of the interior design if staging isn’t your strength or something that you want to mess with.

Next Week!

This is where the rubber meets the road. All of the hard work we’ve done gets showcased online and we start getting buyers through the door to tour your home and make offers. Next week we’ll be covering Digital Marketing that Sells. See you next week!

Today I’m going to talk about updates and repairs for Sellers and how I can help. In this post, I will be sharing actual experiences I’ve had with Sellers where I sit down and walk them through the home selling process.

First Thing’s First

When advising Sellers it starts with a budget and a timeline. If we start with the timeline we learn how much we can truly achieve in the time we have available. The time you have to work on your home after work, on weekends, or whenever that is, we want to make sure the timeline aligns with our overall plan.

Once we have a timeline established, that flows into an actual budget. That’s how much money we can spend on repairs to get the house 100% ready. When we talk about budget and timeline, we are starting to develop the overall plan for the Home Buyer Experience that we want to create, for them to be attracted to your house through our digital marketing efforts.

Digital Marketing Wins

Our #1 goal is to bring Buyers into your home, so when they walk in they are excited and want to take action to purchase it. Last week I shared the importance of digital marketing and how it’s king right now. All Buyers start their search by looking online. They aren’t doing open houses or talking to salespeople like me. They’re doing their own research to find out what they are interested in and if it’s even possible for them to purchase a home.

When people start online we must make sure digital marketing creates an overall experience designed to attract Home Buyers online first, then get them to tour your home, and ultimately make an offer.

Top Updates for Your Home

If a Seller has owned a Denver Home for more than 4 years, they have over $100,000 in equity. More importantly, Sellers are now getting curious about what that money could do for their life. Right? That being said Sellers also don’t want to have a massive budget to do a time consuming remodel of their home.

So to be able to capture the upside with speed and execution, here are what most Sellers are doing to get top dollar for their home in the shortest period of time.

For Sellers cashing out equity, these updates get top dollar and can be done quickly.

#1 Deferred Maintenance

The first priority is focusing on deferred maintenance. This is taking care of things like…caulking around the shower that has started to come up and it needs to be scraped and redone because of mildew. Another example would be paint touch-ups around the interior or exterior. This could also include raking river rocks that has moved after all the snow, raking up fall leaves, etc. Taking care of the regular maintenance required every single year to keep the house looking fresh and cared for. Deferred maintenance, that’s #1.

#2 Light Remodeling

Next on the list is basic remodeling. With this we really want to keep within the realm of small updates that make the most impact. Most importantly they don’t take a lot of time to complete. This would include things like all your smoke detectors. If they look yellow and haven’t been replaced for 5 or 10 years, replacing all of them is a minor cost and big impact.

Same thing for cabinet hardware, or doorknobs and hinges. Changing them out from brass to stainless steel or nickel makes a home really look nice for not a lot of money. Light remodeling includes all of the little things that really enhance the look and appearance of the house, like light fixtures, fans, etc.

You can expand the list to electrical outlet covers or dimmer switches. It can include anything that makes the home look more modern and Buyers will see attractive design versus work that they will need to do after closing. Thes little things go a long way because most buyers don’t want to do any work after they’ve closed! That’s why basic remodeling is super important.

The last item I will mention is interior paint. There are several approaches here, one would be to do paint touch-ups throughout the house. Like the doors, the trim, the walls. You can touch it up if it matches properly. It all requires a color that will support that.

Or consider doing different color walls or rooms. Whatever is going to create the most impact in your home based within your timeline. Because again, if we’re talking about an experience the homebuyer. They are going to walk in and if you’ve just painted, what’s it going to smell like, right? It’s going to smell like fresh paint! And people are going to be curious about what you did to the home. With all of these updates, we will be sure to highlight each one of them in our digital marketing. So it speaks to them in their online search first!

Updates to Your Home that Get Buyers Coming Back

Let Me Help w/ ALL of This!

I want to encourage all the sellers to let me help you with this process. Everything is fully customizable based on your home budget and timeline. And when I sit down with You I want to talk about the things specific to your home. Maybe in the bathroom, there’s a countertop and a sink that don’t look right. If potential a Buyer won’t like it we can discuss replacing it. Especially if it would only cost $2000 to repair and fix. And that would be money you get back after the sale.

These are the kinds of things we can drill in by walking through the house together and I can offer my advice. I’m happy to share with Sellers the updates and repairs that will get you top dollar within the budget and timeline that you’re considering.

Next Week…

As we continue to build on attracting the ideal buyer into your home, we’ll be talking about staging and interior design. I’ll be excited to share what that means and how we’re going to take action! Have an awesome day and talk soon!

Sellers Who Stage Know How to Win