YOU ONLY HAVE ONE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE AN IMPRESSION, SO MAKE IT COUNT! 

Staging of your home is one of the best ways for a seller to achieve the desired result of selling his or her home for maximum value.

One of the biggest challenges for every homeowner is that “you have invested many years of wonderful times, memories and of course money into your home, and it is really hard to even imagine moving somewhere else,” says RE/MAX of Southern Africa Marketing and Finance Director Jeanne van Jaarsveldt. He adds: “A house is a product, and should be marketed and sold like any other product which has competition in the marketplace. The ability to disassociate yourself from your home and to ‘let go’ of your emotions is key. Furthermore, the ability to focus on the fact that a buyer of your home may change most of your space to fit their tastes, is also of paramount importance.

”The art of staging a house for selling has been widely practiced around the globe, and statistics from the United States of America concludes that staging your home correctly will result in up to 93% of homes to sell within 30 days of listing. This trend is certainly the case in the South African market as well, according to REMAX of Southern Africa statistics, where more than 2 100 agents regularly comment on the value of presenting a house well. The increased availability of homes on the market makes every seller have to compete for top honours against all other properties listed within the same price segment.

Concludes Van Jaarsveldt: “As we are in a very strong buyers market, sellers must understand that a favourable presentation of their home, leading to an enjoyable experience for the buyer will ultimately lead to record sales time of their home, but also at a very reasonable market related price. “Within RE/MAX, we draw a huge amount of experience from our counterparts in the US, where staging of a home is an art that immediately creates buyers interest in the listed property.This is a section where the estate agent can add tremendous value to the home buying experience.”RE/MAX lists the following tips for sellers in staging your home for selling:

• Natural light and light-filled homes are always in demand as this sends a key message to the buyer that he/she is welcomed inside!
• De-clutter your home, as clutter eats equity. Pack away all those little “favourite” items around the house.
• Make sure your home is clean, inside and out.
• De-personalise your home, so pack up to 90% of the personal photographs away.
• Splash a bit of colour to your home, in order to bring life back to it; examples could be colourful towels, a rug, a bedspread or some colourful couch pillows.
• Lastly, do not forget general landscaping around your home. Trees and scrubs can beautifully add to the character of your home, but unless they are trimmed and tame, they appear to make your house dark. Add some colour – it is always a winner!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under In & around your house. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.