Preparing Homes For Sale in Rockland and Bergen

Free monthly newsletter with advice for selling homeowners.

We can help you prepare your home for sale. To sell your house in weeks not months, start with an evaluation by a professional home stager.

Contact us for an in-home evaluation now.

Stage Your Own Home

Science and art of staging

There are several steps and many common sense rules of preparation that home stagers follow to achieve a look that will appeal to a buyer. A homeowner can follow these steps and apply the rules to make his or her home more competitive in the market without hiring a professional stager. Of course, there is an art to presentation as well as the rules. Many homeowners have a good sense of design -- of light and space, balance, rhythm, texture, color and contrast. If you have such a sense, the information on this page will help you prepare and present your home for sale.

Be objective and be successful

If you want to prepare your house for sale by yourself, you need to be thoroughly objective about it. Working to repair, update, clean and declutter, you can achieve the results that are essential to preparing your house. If, before you start, you want the benefit of our advice to point you in the right direction, or at any point you want us to work with you or advise you as your counsellor, give us a call.

If you want to sell your house quickly. . .

Your house should be prepared for sale and photographed before it is put on the market. As home stagers frequently say, you get only one chance to make a first impression.

1. Don’t take photos until your home has been staged.

More buyers than ever are searching on line: 90% of all home buyers used the Internet to search for homes in 2009, according to the National Association of Realtors. They simply weed out houses that don't look great in on-line photos. As a result, unstaged houses just don't get the same traffic. Because unstaged houses don’t show as well in person either, prospective buyers that do visit are less likely to make offers. So unstaged houses spend longer on the market.

2. Don’t hold an open house until your home is properly prepared to sell.

You are competing for buyers against the top 10% of houses in your area, so to sell your house fast, you need to make sure that it is priced right and that it shows as well as the top 10%. Few buyers today want to do any work in the house they buy. They want it move-in ready. If your house needs work, buyers will nearly always look elsewhere unless you sharply cut the price.

Proper preparation will give you a huge advantage over your competition. Just what you need to sell your home fast.

What you can do to prepare your home for sale

While we cannot, on a web page, convey everything covered in a professional staging course or gained from experience of staging houses, here are some of the most important things homeowners can do to prepare and present their homes:

7 steps of preparation

Evaluate: Make a list of everything that needs to be done
Repair: Buyers want a move-in ready house and will typically demand a discount of more than the actual repair cost if the seller does not handle it.
Update: Cabinet hardware, switchplates, and light fixtures are typical minor updates that pay. Wallpaper and wallpaper borders need to be removed, and bold paint colors need to be replaced.
Declutter: Collections, religious objects, and family photos should be packed away, since they are distractions. Same with expensive artwork and antiques. Packing these now saves time later.
Clean: Buyers expect a spotless house, especially kitchens and bathrooms. Clean windows, dust high places, remove stains from carpets, vacuum closet floors and shelves.
Stage: Make the house light, spacious and warming. Stagers use wall colors, furniture arrangements, window treatments and accessories to highlight each room's best features. This step will be hardest for a non-professional to accomplish. See the video below for an idea of what is being aimed for. Suggestion: Now that you have done the preparatory work, call The Staging Prince to do the staging and to check your decluttering.
Photograph: Make sure your photos are ultra-wide-angle, sharp and well-lit. See "Great photos are important" below.

25 staging tips

Remove front lawn debris, toys, trash cans, etc.
Remove and replace dead shrubbery
Paint or replace the front door; and replace its hardware
Paint or replace the mailbox
Replace the front porch light, door mat and house numbers
Wash the windows, inside and outside
Pack up contents of bookcases and knick-knack shelves
Remove all personal photos; patch nail holes in walls
Remove excess furniture to reduce clutter and improve traffic flow
Clean out your closets
Clean off the kitchen counter
Remove all refrigerator magnets and notes
Remove any pet blankets, dishes, litter boxes
Empty all garbage cans and waste baskets daily
Clean your house thoroughly including carpets and tops of door and window frames
Buy new kitchen cabinet pulls
Remove dust-collecting fake plants
Replace old faucets; fix all leaks
Repaint rooms a neutral color (beige, tan, cream, gray-green) -- not bold or white.
Replace bath linens and shower curtains
Hide personal bath items in a drawer or cabinet
Remove stuff from floors
Remove heavy draperies; replace with budget bamboo, grass, shears or nothing
Max the wattage of light bulbs and turn them on
Ask a friend or neighbor to sniff for odors

Great photos are important

Nearly all buyers (90% of them) start their search for houses on the web. So your home has to show really well in on-line photos. If your home doesn’t show well in photos on the web, buyers will never visit. This is a fact of life in a buyer’s market -- in which there are a multitude of sellers vying for the attention of a small pool of buyers. And if buyers don’t visit your house, you’ve lost any chance of getting an offer from them. Since you want a potential buyer to see how attractive your house is, make sure your on-line photos are top-notch. Here’s how:

Prepare your home and have it staged.
Don’t take photos until your home has been staged, to avoid being weeded out when viewed on the web.
Make sure your photos are ultra-wide-angle, sharp and well-lit.
Post your photos everywhere buyers will see them -- or hire an Internet-savvy agent to do it.

If your agent will be taking your photos, review the quality of photos she has posted for other listed houses.

This is what you should be aiming for in staging

This brief virtual tour will help you see how it works.

Staging Presentation

Remember that you can call us for help with presenting your house or to review your preparation.