How To Stage Your Own Home For Sale
Here’s the reality of selling a home - staging is essential. It puts your home’s best foot forward and helps people envision themselves living there. While I can see past clutter, cheap furniture, and interesting finishes to see the potential in a home, most people can’t. It’s so valuable that when we listed our loft, someone wanted to buy not only our loft, but everything in it as well. On the converse side, when we originally bought the loft, the sellers opted not to stage the home or invest in photography and it showed - and we got it for a really good price because demand was low. A true testament to the power of staging.
The problem with staging? It’s expensive.
In San Francisco, staging can run between 7-12k/2 months for a 1500sq ft home. On top of that, the seller is already paying for agent fees, closing costs, etc. The price you list at is not the price that ends up in your pocket. On a $1m home, $50-60k of that is eaten away in agent fees alone. While the agent is in charge of marketing a home, photography, making a website, sending emails etc., the task of making a home presentable and the cost of doing so falls squarely on the homeowner.
When we inquired, we were shocked at not only the price (do you know how much furniture I could buy for my new house with that amount??), but at how busy people were. Most stagers were booked up for months, and we couldn’t wait that long. So, we decided to stage it ourselves. Admittedly, going at it alone isn’t for everyone, but in our case we had good furniture and accessories and could sacrifice by living without it for a few months after we moved (we slept on a mattress on the floor, used a new outdoor dining set as a table, and lived with a set of 6 plates and utensils for months).
In case you decide to go the solo route, here are a few staging tips:
Take Everything Personal Out
While people want to envision what life could be like in your home, they don’t want to envision what your life was like in the home. That means anything personal goes. In our case, we took all of my Asian antiques, photos, clothes, etc. Everything that was left needed to feel like it was there on purpose. It almost feels like a blank slate with a few accessories layered in.
We knew we’d succeeded when we walked in and, although everything felt familiar, it felt like being a weird, perfect, magazine version of our home.
Think About Who Your Buyer Is
When we moved into our loft, we were young, urban professionals, and we definitely didn’t have kids. That’s who we figured would be buying the loft, so we staged accordingly. The space we used for Luca’s room was transformed from a kid’s room into an office space, the back bedroom that we used as a family/guest room was transformed into a genuine bedroom.
In this photo, the rug, plant, lamp and accessories are mine. The desk and chair are from Oliver Space.
Rent Furniture To Fill In The Gaps
After we took all the personal, kid and family room furniture out, we needed to fill in the gaps with different pieces. It felt wasteful to buy cheap furniture, just to have to get rid of it later, so I turned to rental. We used Oliver Space rentals to get all the furniture in the guest room and office, along with a living room rug and coffee table. While I did end up buying new bedding and towels from Target to make the beds, I can easily reuse those in my new home so they didn’t feel like a waste.
In this photo: Coffee table and rug from Oliver Space
Do Work Yourself
Decent at wall painting and patching? Do it yourself. Rather than hire painters and a handperson to spruce the home up, my husband did it all. It took a few late nights, but the effort was worth it when we didn’t have to pay more $$$ for something we could easily do ourselves.
Edit, Edit, Edit
Less is more when it comes to staging. My house definitely has more stuff in it, but I forced myself to edit down drastically. Luckily, I already had all of the accessories (art, coffee table books, plants) and ended up using half of what I thought. When in doubt, take it out!
This gallery wall used to have 2x more art on it, but it felt crowded so I took half of it off.
Plants Set The Mood
Plants are great at setting a mood and making a place feel homey. We luckily had a huge assortment of plants to pick from, but if you don’t have plants then this is one thing I think you should invest in or look at renting.