An Expert's Guide to Home Staging | Sell Your Home for the Best Price, In The Fastest Possible Time

Home staging is big in the USA but it still sounds to many people in this country a little bit like an American fad. It’s the act of getting a home ready to look its absolute best before it goes for sale on the property websites, and home staging has become a key property marketing tool for when your home goes onto the property websites, where everyone is looking for their dream home. It’s that dream that home staging creates.

Home staging will include many elements depending on the property and on the situation. It will usually include decluttering, so potential viewers can look at your home and see it as a lovely place that they want to live in rather than a house full of somebody else's clutter. It could go as far as redecoration, as many of the homes we see haven't been decorated for a number of years and the owner decides that they that they want to sell and move on to the next stage of their life.

Sometimes walls are over-coloured and that makes the house look dated, so repainting those to white, or something very close to it, can be a real game-changer in terms of getting more people to view the house. I hate to say this, but many homes you go into have an unpleasant smell. This may come from pets, ingrained things that have been spilled on the carpet or cigarette smoke.  Changing carpets ahead of a sale is a relatively small investment as part of making the home much more desirable to a much wider audience.

When we are working in occupied homes, we try to work with the furniture and accessories, including artwork, that the seller is living with because it makes them feel more comfortable through the whole process of sale. It also keeps budgets to as small as possible as home staging is about getting the best price for your home, so we are trying to bring in the biggest-possible audience of viewers.

We may rearrange furniture and accessories, or bring in a few extra pieces of furniture or art, to market the property more effectively when estate agents take photographs for the property portals such as Rightmove, Zoopla and On The Market and and make it look appealing and desirable on screen.

Estate agents usually value property according to price per square foot in the area, and home staging is the tool that pushes the price to the higher end of the range of valuation and makes more people want to view it.

Currently, less than 1% of homes in this country take any professional help with presentation for the property market - and you only have to scroll through the property portals for a few minutes to to understand exactly what I mean! Your home has seven seconds on that portal to make the first impression for somebody to go: “Yes, I want to go and view that”, so visual presentation is really important. Many homes that are staged before they come onto the market are getting offers of 10-15% higher than comparable homes, and they tend to sell four times faster than ones that haven’t been staged.

Also, if your home is taking a bit of time to sell, rather than drop the price, I would consider staging it if you haven’t already done so. Often, it's not that people think that a property is overvalued, it's simply because they can't see themselves living there, so changing the presentation is a really good trigger to get more people interested.

It’s dependent on what exactly needs to be done to get the property looking its absolute best for launch, but it’s usually between 0.5% and 1.5% of the guide price. As an example, on a £600,000 property, the cost will go from about £3,000 for a big tidy-up or rearrangement before professional photography, to about £9,000 if it needs a lot of furniture or some decorating or some new carpets, for example.

Staging properties is Lemon & Lime’s core business, so if needed, we can do a quick home staging turnaround in two weeks, and of course, it will still be possible to live comfortably in the place. We can supply rental furniture, so people can really see what a home will be like to live in. If a house has four bedrooms, but one is being used as an ironing room, it still needs a bed in it, because people want to see those four bedrooms can be used.

To sum up, the main benefits then of using professional home staging means that for a relatively small budget, you get a much bigger return on your investment when the property is sold by getting competing offers in very quick time. Secondly, it takes all the hassle out of having to get ready to go on the market. It's a quick fix to get done. We do all the jobs you were going to get done in the last few years you've been living there to ensure that you have photography which makes your home stand out from the competition.