Real Estate for Resale: 5 Tips for Preparing and Staging Home

From the moment your potential buyer drives up the street and arrives at your home they are forming opinions about the property. Generally, whether or not they can see themselves and their family living there is their primary focus. Knowing this fact, it is your job, as the real estate seller, to ensure that your potential buyers have the best experience with your home - from the moment they drive up to the curb. After all, you want them to view your real estate and immediately make you a great offer to purchase it!

Selling real estate requires that you take into consideration the way people look at things and the decisions they make based on what they have seen. To this end, here are five tips you can use to better prepare and stage your real estate for resale:

Tip #1 - Curb Appeal: It is said that a potential buyer forms an opinion on a piece of real estate within the first 15 seconds of when they arrive at the home. For this reason, you need to make sure that your house has great curb appeal. Plant some flowers, trim back any wild looking bushes or trees, and take care to look at your house as someone would be driving up to it for the first time.

Tip #2 - Declutter and Declutter More: Your personal items are what make your home uniquely yours. While this is wonderful for you and your family, but the truth is that your personal items stand in the way of your potential buyer being able to picture themselves in your home. The cheapest and easiest thing you can do to prepare real estate for sale is to ruthlessly declutter. First do a general declutter and then really get serious and remove as much of your personal items as possible.

Tip #3 - Clean and Deodorize: Nothing is worse than driving up to a potentially great house to find that it smells bad or is dirty on the inside. Your home should be deep cleaned and every effort made to eliminate any odors which it may have. You may find that hiring a cleaning service to do the deep cleaning for you make a world of difference in how the home looks. Additionally, if there is odor such as from a cat box make sure that you are able to eliminate them at the source rather than simply trying to mask them with the use of deodorizers or other similar products.

Tip #4 - Appeal to Broad Audience: In everything you change about your house to prepare it for resale, you need to make sure that your changes appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. Rather than have to find "just the right buyer" your goal is to have your real estate have mass appeal and receive multiple competing offers. The best way to do this is by the use of subtle and neutral colors schemes and clean, modern style. Try to avoid using colors and styles which will only appeal to a small number of potential buyers.

Tip #5 - Stage Your Home Well: Staging your house is the art of "showing" your potential buyer how each room in your house can be used and decorated. If you have good design sense then you can attempt to stage your own house for resale. However, if you are not terribly design orientated, it might be best left to the professionals. Plan on staging costing you about 1% of your sales price, but also plan on a staged home fetching you a larger sales price as well.