Selling your house is a very big deal. Not only is it likely to be the biggest business transaction you’ve ever undertaken, there can be strong emotional turmoil for you and your family as you move through the process. In spite of the chaos you might be feeling, you’ll want to maximise every possible advantage styling or staging your home can give you ahead of the listing. This process can help to eliminate some of the internal turmoil and make the financial rewards easier to come by.

Hiring a home stager to help you prepare your house for listing can be a time and energy saving strategy. It can also help save your sanity. Selling a house can be nerve-wracking work and an especially heavy burden if you also have other commitments. (Like managing a job and a family.) If you are considering hiring a stager, do yourself a big favour and pick one you can communicate with. If you are unable to put your faith in this person, you may be wasting your money.

It is not at all unusual for you to experience some mixed feelings over the changes you have in store. First of all, we humans like to feel grounded. The problem with moving on to a new and exciting future is that it uproots us from what has become natural and normal. Scientists tell us that changing houses has an emotional effect not unlike a divorce or a death in the family – of course you feel a little at odds.

To make matters worse, in order to sell our old house, steps must be taken to erase our emotional ownership of the house. The farther you can be from the work associated with staging this house the better off you’ll be from a psychological perspective.

When you hire a home stager, the first order of business is to eliminate your ‘tracks’. This is called depersonalising your property. It means taking down your family photos, your nick-knacks, and your souvenirs of holidays past. It means, perhaps, eliminating the purple walls in your master bedroom in favour of a less flamboyant colour. Such things are apt to stick in your throat like a fish bone.

If you’re very smart you will realise that these changes are the best way to make your home attractive to as many potential buyers as possible. If you’re very persistent, you’ll manage to keep this thought process at the top of your mind in order to “divorce” yourself from the bricks and mortar of your old house without too much trauma.

For some, the best way to do this is to just walk away. If you can manage to hire a home stager and give the entire project over to that professional, you’re ahead of the game. The less often you must deal with the physical changes in your old home, the easier it will be for the transformation to take place.

Transformation? Yes. Your home stager’s goal is to transform what was a personally pleasing place for you and your unique family into something that will appeal to others who might not share your tastes. Home stagers are trained to find and implement the triggers that can pique the attention of a very broad range of buyers. Appealing to the masses isn’t necessarily something that comes naturally to the rest of us.

The advantage styling to please a wider group of buyers is likely to mean a faster sale. In the end it will mean more money for you since, the longer your house remains on the market, the more money you will have to shell out. Mortgage payments continue while a house waits for new owners. So do insurance payments and electricity bills. The sooner and more thoroughly your home stylist can bring about the transformation, the better off you will be.

If you can disentangle yourself from your house by leaving the work of staging to the professionals, you’ll find the entire process less painful. If you can distance yourself from the countless little staging decisions and allow the stager to do the heavy lifting, you’ll be better off in all ways. Turning the entire project over to your sales team, the selling agent and the stager, is the ideal answer.

Once professionally staged, your home will probably sell faster. It will most likely sell for more money. You will have saved your psyche and maximised your advantage. Styling homes for sale is part art, part science, and is built upon psychology. Recognising emotional land-mines and steering clear of them will make the process easier on everybody – most especially, you.