Staging Basics to Help You Sell Your Home in Scottsdale

Staging is an essential piece of the home-selling process, but if you’re like most people selling a home in Scottsdale, you’re not sure where to start – or where to stop. Here’s what you need to know.

Staging Basics: The Fundamentals of Making Your Scottsdale Home More Appealing to Buyers

When your real estate agent talks to you about listing your home, he or she will walk through it with you to determine which areas could use a little TLC or improvements – but you can increase your home’s appeal before your agent even comes over the first time by tackling these basics:

Cleaning
Decluttering
Styling

Cleaning

Your home has to be completely, spotlessly clean before you can stage it to sell. In many cases, that means hiring a professional cleaning company to come in and scrub everything from top to bottom. There are plenty of pros to hiring a cleaning service:

You’ll save time that you could spend doing other, more important things
Your cleaners will know all the hotspots to hit, and they’ll leave no proverbial stone unturned
You’ll only have to maintain what the pros did, so while your home is on the market, you’ll only be responsible for the light cleaning necessary when prospective buyers come to call

If you choose not to hire a professional cleaning company, you can still get your house sparkling – you’ll just need a little more elbow grease.

Bathrooms

Clean the showers and tubs thoroughly
Brighten up the grout using bleach (or apply new grout)
Dust the vent fan covers
Clean light switches
Clean mirrors and faucets with window cleaner
Scour the toilets
Refresh plastic shower curtain liners by putting them in the washing machine with a few old towels (and hang them back in the shower to dry)
Scrub the floors
Clean countertops and all other surfaces with disposable antibacterial wipes

Bedrooms

Dust all the corners, top and bottom
Move the bed, dresser and other furnishings to sweep or vacuum
Have your rugs professionally cleaned
Dust every surface
Clean the windows, inside and out
Spot-clean the walls as necessary
Remove your light cover and clean inside it
Clean the light switches

Kitchen

Dust the tops of cabinets and cabinet faces, particularly in recessed areas
Scrub countertops with disposable antibacterial wipes
Clean faucets with window cleaner
Wash windows, inside and out
Run orange peels and ice cubes through your garbage disposal
Clean the oven
Clean the stovetop
Clean appliance surfaces
Clean the inside and outside of your refrigerator

Decluttering

Once your house is clean, you’ll probably need to declutter – most of us do. In fact, almost all of us have items that the house would look better without, such as excess furniture, more knickknacks than we need, and other items that we just don’t use enough to justify keeping out when prospective buyers are coming to see the house.

A good rule of thumb: If you haven’t used something in 6 months or more, it doesn’t need to be in your house for showings. You don’t have to donate or throw away these items, though – you just have to pack them up and put them in storage so you can take them out in your new home. (You might even find that you don’t miss them, and in that case, you can choose to donate or sell them.)

Your goal with decluttering is to showcase how much space your home has. That means anything that’s not essential to your everyday living or that doesn’t serve a decorative purpose might need to be packed away for your next house. You don’t want prospective buyers to think that your home will be filled to the brim with their belongings, so the best way to make it appear more spacious is to free up more space.

Decluttering also means getting rid of excess furniture. If you have a recliner that’s seen better days, for example, it might be best to put it in storage so it doesn’t interrupt traffic flow or make your space appear smaller.

Styling

You don’t need to redecorate your entire home to style it to sell. In fact, it might take a lot less than that to make it more appealing to prospective buyers. You can make a huge difference with little improvements.

First things first: Take down personalized decor. Family photos and art that doesn’t appeal to a wide audience need to come down while you’re trying to sell – that way, buyers can visualize their own decor in your space. Take down anything that’s considered religious, eccentric or eclectic, too. Think of what you’d see in a luxury hotel and let that guide you.

Use these tips to make your home traffic-friendly and appealing to more buyers:

Make sure your sofa and chairs are arranged in conversational groupings in the living room
Put decorative items in groups of three, five or seven, but don’t overdo it
Don’t display unique collections – choose simple, more mudane decor

Are You Buying or Selling a Home in DC Ranch?

Call us at 480-360-0281 to find out how we’ll aggressively market your home to all the right buyers – or you can call us to talk about what you want from your new home in DC Ranch.

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Don Matheson
Realtor | Founder
The Matheson Team
RE/MAX Fine Properties
21000 N. Pima Rd., #100, Scottsdale, AZ 85255
866-613-8356
don@scottsdalerealestate.com