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.

On-Line Photos Sell Your Home

Are your photos helping or hurting?

Nearly all buyers look 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 weed it out and never visit. This is a fact of life in a buyer’s market. And if buyers don’t visit, you’ve lost any chance of getting an offer from them. Here are two simple rules that will help you sell your house and may make the difference between its selling fast and near its listing price, and languishing, waiting for a price cut:

Look at photos on the web

Take a look at the on-line photos of other homes for sale. How many aren’t well-composed or of really good quality?

• Some photos are so dark that you can’t make out the features of the room. Dark photos won’t entice a buyer to visit.
• A buyer wants to see the whole room as well as the focal point (such as a fireplace) set in the room. A kitchen shot should show the cabinets, some appliances and the table in an eat-in kitchen. A bedroom should show not just the bed but light and space. To take these interior shots requires a camera with an ultra-wide-angle lens. The 28mm equivalent lens of a standard point & shoot camera won’t show what a buyer wants to see. There are several suitable compact digital cameras available with a 24mm equivalent lens, high-resolution and good low-light capabilities at reasonable prices.
• The photos of some homes are mostly exterior shots – with just one or two rooms shown. This doesn’t give buyers much information about those homes, and they’ll select other homes to visit instead. At least 10-12 interior shots are essential to give the buyer a good sense of what a home looks like inside.
• Too frequently the photos are arranged haphazardly: duplicates or even triplicates, and in no particular order. This carelessness virtually assures that a buyer will look elsewhere. You want a buyer to see the home as in a visit: first the front of the house, then the entry, living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, and the bedrooms – or at least the master bedroom and bath – and then the backyard.
• A well-made virtual tour – whether a video or pan and zoom stills -- can be very useful to show how spacious your home is. On the other hand, some viewers find that one type of virtual tour (stitched 360-degree circular views of a room) make them dizzy because the two side walls are closer to the camera, which is set up in the exact middle of the room, and the resulting distortion induces motion sickness. Not likely to attract a buyer. But see the well-made virtual tour on our About Staging page. It's well worth the modest investment.

Ignoring either of the two simple rules above means that most buyers will weed out your house on the web and never visit it in person. Few buyers’ visits means a long wait for an offer. That also makes sense, right?

Clutter eats equity

There is a saying among staging advisors: "Clutter eats equity." The photo above of a wall in a Rockland kitchen is unfortunately not unusual. While it is of good photographic quality, and the house itself has desirable features, many on-line buyers will go on to the next house, and this one will miss potential offers. But it doesn't have to happen that way.

Or kill two birds with one stone: Ask The Staging Prince to take photos after we stage your home. Call us for a professional home evaluation -- even if your home is already listed and has been photographed. You can post better photos that will entice buyers to visit.