Why Stage Your Home?

A diamond is a diamond always. But a well-cut diamond with deft hands glitters wonderfully and invites all when put in the show case of a jeweler. This theory squarely applies in the case of marketing your house for sale, in today’s competitive market. You go to a jeweler’s shop where an uncut big diamond stone, with more weight and value and a fine-cut one, but smaller in size are exhibited side-by-side. It goes without saying which one you will pick readily and why.
The US housing market is choking with piled up inventory of unsold properties. There are many reasons like the down-turned economy, tightening up of home loan procedures, foreclosure devastation rendering many “as is” properties on distress sale, for a fraction of their value; investors hesitating on seeing the home prices nose-diving and so on.
Still homes are being sold, since the housing demand is perennial for people who need a home in which to live, arising out of varied reasons – a marriage; child birth; expansion of members in the family; inconveniences in their present residences; relocation by shifting of business or employment etc.
The only thing is, they have now become selective in buying, since the market offers them plenty to choose from, unlike never before. Statistics reveal that currently a home buyer flipping the pages of a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is bombarded with many houses having identical features, facilities and square footage they want.
See this example. Chesapeake is an independent city in the South Hamptons Road portion of the Hamptons Road region - consisting of seven cities - including the renowned Virginia Beach. Chesapeake is the second largest city by land area in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Its estimated population in 2006 was 220,560 – an increase by 10.7% from 2000 Census. Chesapeake is an ideal city with few urban areas and vast square miles of protected farm land, wherein home buyers evince interest for properties, so to live in a peaceful and serene atmosphere, without foregoing the facilities of urban life. By way of its location on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, it has miles of water-front industrial, commercial and residential properties.
For decades, home selling in Chesapeake was an easy thing, like elsewhere in such lovely neighborhoods in US. The sluggishness in the US housing market, due to reasons cited earlier has caught up with Chesapeake as well. The result is there are 2,439 residential properties lying unsold, along with 247 properties advertised for “distress sale” as on date. During the last one year, the problem has become more acute, as recorded by real estate sites overall in the country.
In this situation, if you are a home seller proposing to list your home in the MLS listings for sale, what will you do? No question – your home has all the required comforts and amenities and you want to get the reasonable price for it, so to meet your financial commitments.
The prudent thing in the present circumstances to do is to “stage” your home properly, so that it looks upbeat with attractive “curb appeal”; clean up the mess and clutter inside the rooms; fix up small repairs; paint places wherever needed with pleasing neutral colors; and in short make your home a perfect match for the buyer’s needs. But all these staging techniques need a Home Staging professional – experienced with hundreds of homes staged before, so as to work in unison with your budget and proposals. They know very well the buyer’s psychology to prepare your home, by maximizing its appeal and minimizing its shortcomings.
This way you make your home stand out above the crowd of homes listed for sale - those in your neighborhood or street. Then you list your property for sale and surely you will see the best results. After all any home buyer is looking for the most beautiful and bright home in your neighborhood and would be too willing to pay the right price.
You can get fantastic ideas on Home Staging and a Free Book with lot of practical and useful tips at www.xanadustaging.com
Ramaswamy Sundaram is certified Expert Author at this site. He can write on any subject, having turned out more than 1500 write ups on varied subjects and topics given by service buyer. In coordination with an expert Home Staging professional in Virginia Beach, US, he is writing many articles here on this subject. For any of your writing requirements, he can be contacted at sulosundar03@gmail.com