Selling your home? Here’s our top 10 home staging tips for 2021

If you are planning to sell your home in 2021, you will want to make sure that your home is looking its absolute best for potential buyers. Presentation can play a vital part in boosting your home’s value and selling quickly. During the current lockdown, having a visually aesthetic home is especially important, as more people are shopping for homes online. Featuring high-quality listing photos and videos are essential to improving your home’s virtual appeal to stand out in today’s competitive marketplace.

Preparing your home for sale is called ‘home staging’, and it involves making it the most appealing to the maximum number of potential buyers. If you would like to read more about home staging, read this.

Whether you’re currently preparing to sell or are trying to breathe new life into a stagnant listing, take a look at our top 10 home staging tips to help your home sell faster and for more money.

Strong first impressions

The first thing a potential buyer is going to notice about your home is the front entrance and exterior, so you’ll want to make a good first impression. The three main things to focus on are 1. Ensure that it looks clean and that you have scrubbed away any dirt that might have accumulated, 2. Remove any seasonal or other personal decorations so that your home looks more modern, and 3. Consider adding a potted plant or a doormat, provided that they are well maintained and in good condition. These steps will create a welcoming frontage to your home and start buyers off on the right foot.

Focus on the most important rooms

If you are short on time or money, your efforts are best focused on the rooms that will have the biggest influence on buyers’ decisions. These rooms are the living room, master bedroom, and kitchen. Children’s bedrooms or guest bedrooms are less likely to affect a buyer’s decision, so don’t worry as much about those spaces.

Clear away clutter

If you take anything away from this article, it should be this point. Try to get rid of all the clutter in your home. This might be a good excuse to do that big clear out you’ve been putting off, or if you don’t want to throw anything away, make sure you store everything nearly out of sight. All floors and surfaces should be clutter free, your cupboards and shelves should be neatly organised too. It can be quite a task, but it will make all the difference.

Deep clean!

After you’ve removed all your clutter, you’ll want to give your home a deep clean. Shine your floors, clean your windows, scrub your grout, and make every surface spotless. If necessary, hire somebody to do the more difficult aspects.

Another part of this is removing any bad odours that may be present. The smells that viewers consider to be major turn-offs include cigarettes, pungent or ‘off’ foods, pet smells and any smells that might originate from your bathroom (no need to expand on that further).

Luckily, this one may not be as much of an issue if your Estate Agent is carrying out virtual viewings during the pandemic. However, it never hurts to have a nice smelling home. Open your windows to let in a breeze, light a candle, use air freshener, make sure to have a bathroom scrub down – even changing your bedsheets and hoovering the floor can make a difference.

Touch-ups and minor repairs

If there are any small repairs that need doing, make sure you fix these before you have your listing photographs taken. Fill any chips or dents in your walls, touch up your skirting boards, fix any loose handles and replace lightbulbs. You want potential buyers to fall in love with your property, not create a mental list of repairs that they would need to do.

De-personalise your spaces

One of the main goals of home staging is to help prospective buyers imagine themselves living in your home. The quickest way to do this is to create a blank canvas for them. The tricky part is to get it just right, so your home still retains its character and charm.

Start by making sure that you store all your clothes out of sight, as well as other personal items on your dresser or bathroom counter, such as toothbrushes or makeup. Secondly, make sure that you remove any personal photographs from your walls and surfaces, including anything that might be pinned to your fridge. We also recommend that you remove anything overtly religious, niche, or controversial, such as items that are political in nature.

While it might feel strange to live in your home after de-personalising, it is extremely helpful for buyers to be able to connect better with the property.

Neutralise

This tip is similar in topic to the point above, but slightly more costly. When you’re staging your home to sell, neutral colours are by far the best way to highlight a room’s assets, make your home appear bigger, and often make a huge difference when it comes to both the price and the time your home spends on the market.

While we love a creatively designed home, quirky décor could be off-putting to some viewers. The art of selling your home fast is to make it look as appealing as possible to the largest possible audience, so if you have particularly bright or dark paint or wallpaper on you walls, consider going lighter. The same goes for heavily patterned flooring or decorations – consider swapping them out for light or neutral tones.

Light up your home

This is especially important while more virtual viewings are taking place – you’ll want to make your home seem as light and bright as possible. This not only helps potential buyers see the spaces more clearly, but it also makes them look bigger.

Open all your window curtains or blinds, turn on all the lights in your home, and if your home still looks dark in one room it might be worth popping to the store for an extra lamp or bedside table. This will help your home to seem more welcoming.

Demonstrate how to use awkward areas

If you have any awkward areas in your home, it is the perfect time to show potential buyers how they can make best use of this space. For example, if you have empty room below your stairs, consider creating a small workstation, built in shelving, or by adding an accent feature. Turn that space into another selling point.

Finishing touches

You’ve almost completed staging your home like a pro but take a look around and see if there are any finishing touches that would make a difference. Get some inspiration from Pinterest if needed. Maybe adding a new rug, cushions, a mirror, or some artwork would give your home that added elegance. Additionally, empty tables could use a centrepiece – a bowl of fruit or fresh flowers would work nicely. Do not underestimate this step as it could make all the difference.

We hope that our 10 top tips for selling your home have provided you with all the information you need to get started and we wish you all the luck with selling your home this year.