How To Quickly Sell Your Home – Without Fire Sale Prices
Written by Bryan Casteel on May 30, 2008
Unless you offer “fire-sale” pricing, you must have your home staged and in top-notch shape. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Today’s buyers have too many homes to choose from. On May 12, 2008 there where 64 homes for sale in the Mason School district from $275,000 to $325,000. The explosion in the number of homes for sale has caused the average home buyer to use a process of elimination to find their next home. Forget about offering “Carpet and Paint allowances”. In fact you need to move beyond clean and fixed up, you need to think about how your home is staged!
As a seller, you look at your home as the place where you live. To sell your home quickly, you will need to understand how a buyer will look at your home. Home buyers use emotion, not facts, when looking at a home. A home buyer is buying a dream, a lifestyle. The home buyer needs to see their dream or lifestyle in your home.
What do I mean by this? When a buyer sees your kitchen, they are dreaming about the big family get together. They are thinking about Sunday morning with the kids. They are not thinking about how YOU live in the home.
How do you sell a dream? It is called home staging. Home staging is not decorating. When you decorate a home you are personalizing the home for you. When you stage a home you are de-personalizing the home so others can see their dream (not yours) in the home.
Look at your home, does it look like a model home? Are there lots of family photos around? Is the kitchen counter covered with stuff? Is your furniture arranged so you can use the room or is it arranged to show off the room? Are mirrors used to make your rooms look bigger? Is all the “clutter” and extra stuff removed? Everyone loves a model home because they can picture in their mind their family being happy in the home. How do they do this? Model homes are staged and sparsely decorated!
As an Accredited Staging Professional, I help my clients through the staging process. Staging Professionals are very good at making your home inspire other people’s dreams. We often find the cost of staging a home is less than the first price reduction. Recent statistics from www.stagedhomes.com prove the point:
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Average days on market for staged homes is currently 31.8 days
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Average days on market for Non-Staged homes is 160 days
So you want to sell your home quickly for as much money as possible? Then hire a Real Estate Team who can work with you to properly price and professionally stage your home.
