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Beyond the basics
Have you ever been stopped in your tracks by the sheer creativity of a department-store window display? That's the goal of staging -- or window dressing -- a home for sale. Professional stagers go beyond cleaning and decluttering; they use the owners' belongings to create vignettes. The goal is to encourage a "Yeah, I could live here" feeling in potential buyers.
Schwarz recalls one house that was "boring, boring, boring." Dressing it up involved cutting tree branches to use as decorative accents in the home, parking a bench from the yard in the master bedroom and making a headboard out of a lounge-chair pad. When the real estate agent saw the transformation, she kicked up the asking price by $10,000, and the place sold for $16,000 more than the listed price. Now that's enhancement.
Increasingly, selling agents bring in and pay for (or encourage sellers to hire) a consultant to prepare a staging report -- a thorough "to do" list for your home and yard that might cost $350. If you need to hire someone to complete the work, you may be able to pay the bills from the proceeds of your sale at closing.
Getting ready
We can help with that "to do" list. First impressions count -- a lot. Do your yard and the outside of your home show care or neglect? Buyers will assume that the inside of the house is the same. Greene suggests that you take a walk around the house, beginning where buyers start -- at the curb. If you normally enter the house through a garage or side entrance, you might be surprised by what you find. "Most sellers never go in their own front door, and they're oblivious to the faded or peeling paint, the rotting threshold, the sunken doorstep and the hanging doorknob," says Greene. Is the roof strewn with leaves or branches? How's the landscaping? Keep the lawn mowed and the shrubs trimmed. Make sure nothing obscures the windows.
Ziegler, author of Sell Your Home Faster With Feng Shui (Dragon Publications, $17), offers these tips for "raising the chi," or positive energy, of your home's entrance: Invest in a new doormat, preferably something in the shape of an oval, circle or half-moon, to balance the 90-degree angles in the door and windows. Plants and foliage similarly soften harsh lines, so place round or oval pots filled with blooming colors and lush plants on the front porch. The front door should be immaculate. The handle or knob should be firm and shiny, and the key should work easily. As the front door opens, make sure visitors' eyes fall on something beautiful, such as fresh flowers or a painting.
Become a minimalist
Declutter, outside and in: Throw things out, pack 'em up, give 'em away. You want buyers to focus on the house -- its architectural features, its amenities, its views -- not your family photographs or Hummel-figurine collection. Plus, you won't have to pay someone to move stuff you're ultimately going to toss.
This point was driven home to Gary and Betsy Kasch, formerly of San Luis Obispo, Cal., shortly after Ziegler advised them to move many of their antiques to storage. The same afternoon, a prospective buyer visited and focused so completely on their antiques that the couple realized she hadn't really seen their home.
Mary McCall, an agent in Tampa, recalls one family with so many kids and pets, and so much stuff, that she couldn't put their house on the market. They ultimately put all the stuff in storage and moved in with relatives. The house sold right away, she says, "for $20,000 more than you would ever have thought." To encourage clients to declutter their homes, Ziegler sometimes offers to rent a storage facility. "It gives them a nudge," she says. "They get the stuff out of the house, out of the garage."
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