Staging Techniques to Help You Think Like a Homebuyer

Written By: Julian Lane

Photo Credit: Jason Boyd via Pexels

After living in the same place for many years, you understand what makes the home special and worthwhile. When you decide to move and have trouble selling that house, you may wonder why others don’t see the same value.

The short answer is that homebuyers have a different perspective on your home. The value seen by the homeowner is usually linked to their emotional connection with that property. Potential buyers, on the other hand, are only looking at the fundamentals of the house to see if it’s a worthwhile location in which to create a home.

With those important differences in mind, Top Pick Guy outlines a few staging techniques to help you think like a homebuyer.

The Staging Advantage

Before we dive into staging details, let’s take a look at some of the advantages that come with this technique. Staging ensures that your home looks attractive and appealing to a greater number of people, notes iBuyer.com. This will lead to more buyers attending your open house and frequenting your online listing. More interest will inevitably lead to potential buyers making higher offers when you decide to sell. In order to get the best results, however, you should focus on curb appeal, natural lighting, and highlighting your home’s best assets.

Clean and Clear Your Home

The best staging starting point for any home seller is a spotless and uncluttered home. Go through your entire house cleaning from top to bottom, scrubbing countertops, washing windows, and shampooing carpets. You want your home to shine like new, but be safe while you’re cleaning and wear a mask. You are cleaning for a reason, so you could make certain germs go airborne in the process. Plus, a mask will prevent you from inhaling any chemicals or splashback from the cleaning process. Also, tidy everything up. Organize your closets, drawers, playrooms, and office areas so that clutter is eliminated. The clean slate will give you a perfect starting point for your next step in staging. 

Cleaning and clearing out the living spaces also aids in the perception of safety. Many people who come to tour your home have children or fur babies, and safety is going to be one of their top concerns. No home can be completely safe, but showing them the potential to be certainly helps. A fenced-in backyard goes a long way in communicating security, as does the absence of certain hazards inside the house like toxic cleaning products and frayed electrical cords.

Ditch the Over-Personalized Decorations

When you’re a homeowner, it’s customary to adorn your walls with photos of your children, extended family, and pets. You might also have special mementos and collections that really make the home yours. While this adds a nice touch for the current owner, potential buyers will feel awkward having every inch of the home covered with personal touches.

Through a process known as depersonalization, Creative Home Stagers explains you need to empty your home of photos, family heirlooms, and other personal knick-knacks in order to achieve a more neutral appeal. This will help house hunters envision living in the space, and you have a better chance of attracting interested buyers with this strategy.

Accent Your Home’s Strengths

Do you have a laundry room, patio, or spacious garage? Find different ways of highlighting these desirable features in order to really attract the attention of buyers. When thinking back on the number of houses they visited, homebuyers will have a better chance of remembering yours through highlighting what matters most to them.

One strategy to accent any room’s features is installing new wallpaper with a design or pattern that leads the eye to appreciate the finer touches in the home. This isn’t the chore it used to be, thanks to modern papers that are easy to install and come in millions of designs. If you currently have wallpaper or painted designs personalized around your tastes, it may be time to do an update. After all, it’s a relatively quick and affordable way to spruce up the interior for an alluring staging.

Attend Local Open Houses

If you’re having a tough time visualizing what homebuyers want, you should attend local open houses of other nearby homes for sale to spark some inspiration. See how other sellers are staging their homes and whether or not their techniques are working. Take note of the things that were done well and those which ended up turning you away. When you’re preparing for your own open house, you can incorporate some of the techniques which stood out to you as being effective.

Talk to a Real Estate Pro

There’s no better resource for learning how homebuyers think than consulting a real estate pro. Experts have mastered the psychology of the homebuyer and can help you implement a staging strategy catered to this thought process. These hyper-concentrated agents can offer even more insight into what buyers expect and desire when buying a home.

Staging a home is all about thinking like a homebuyer. If you can put yourself in the shoes of serious house hunters, you’ll have a better chance of making your home attractive to a wider audience. This will only bring you more offers and a higher selling price.

You will inevitably find things that you need to upgrade in order to get your home ready for sale. When you have that list in hand, visit Top Pick Guy. He posts reviews of many home and garden supplies that will help you to make informed purchasing decisions.