Saturday, May 15, 2010

Top Dollars Quickly When Selling Your Home – If only You Stage Your Home

This is no hype but a proven technique in real estate business. Home sellers who have used the professional help of Home Staging stand testimony to this fact.
Think of it this way – people need a home for living – nevertheless there is a downturn economy, foreclosure fiasco, and recession in the financial markets etc.

They are buying a home, which is most appealing to them in all aspects.
The need for selling a home by the owner – however hard the decision making might be – arises for many reasons. Relocation to another town for employment or business reasons; intention to buy a new home for the use of the family; requirement of finance to meet impending commitments such as mortgage, children’s higher education, marriage in the family and so on.

Similarly the same reasons work in the reverse direction for buying a new home – either for your own living or as an investment to derive permanent rental income – for the property buyers.
Whatever the reason is, a home appearing on the market for sale becomes a “commodity” in a true marketing sense. The deep passion, love or attachment an owner has towards the premise as one’s “home” – a place where the joys and sorrows of life and ups and downs occurred during the period of living there – all of them vanish, once the property is put on the market for sale. It is going to be a different owner, different family and with different tastes from then on.

But only one thing remains – the purpose for which the said “commodity” is put on sale – namely converting the premises into money. It follows that the home owner is desperate for the property to be sold at the right price and the selling process ends, as quickly as possible.

Over decades, home selling in the US housing market was compared to a cake-walk. Particularly during the real estate boom years of 2000 to 2006 it was still easier, when home owners dictated terms to buyers and even selected one from among many competitors. But not anymore – since the housing bubble has made the real estate business topsy-turvy, where hundreds of thousands of homes are lying unsold, in all parts of the country.

This is the dire situation prevailing now, even in remote and smaller towns of the US. For example in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which does not come into the Top 10 States of worst-hit real estate locations for foreclosure epidemic, there is a small port town – Portsmouth – one of the Independent Cities constituting the Hamptons Roads metropolitan area.

This city is maintaining more or less the same population from 2000 to the latest 2008 Census, numbering 100,577 people. The historic active US Naval facility, known as Norfolk Naval Shipyard is located in Portsmouth, where US Navy’s ships of all types are built, remodeled and repaired.

The cityscape of Portsmouth contains many historic architecture buildings, hotels and neighborhoods, where people are living peacefully. The real estate business, as elsewhere, was trotting on even keel at Portsmouth as well. But as of now, there is a recorded inventory of 1,166 homes waiting for buyers, along with 203 foreclosure properties.

In such a stagnated situation, it becomes even more imperative that you make your home “commodity” stand upfront in the listings of properties for sale. How can this be accomplished? Well – an accredited Home Staging professional in the area can do the trick like magic.

With an abundance of experience and expertise gained through repeated Home Staging exercises, an accredited Home Staging professional can help you achieve your objective of neatly presenting your home, as the most attractive one in the neighborhood.
They approach your home with a critical eye, stepping into the shoes of a prospective buyer, right from the very outside appearance of your home to find out “flaws”. For example, the trees and hedges in the front garden may have overgrown, giving a gloomy look of the frontage. The first thing a Home Staging professional will do is to clear this and make similar tactful arrangements to give your home a pep and pleasant “curb appeal”.

In fact this is only for a starter and a seasoned Home Staging pro will not leave any place of your home unprepared – simply put, they will walk through your home like a buyer would – from the front door to the backyard and make every room welcoming and leading to the next. Having handled an array of home buyers, they know the psychology of the buyer like the palm of their hands.

You can very well discuss the Home Staging plan of your home in the presence of your selling agent, with the Home Staging professional, to keep it most suitable to your budget coastwise. Once the appropriate Home Staging is done, you can list your home for sale and find without fail that your home sells for Top Dollars and in Quick Time for sure.

You can go to www.xanadustaging.com and get a FREE REPORT with lot of Home Staging Tips.

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