The way Sydney homeowners are presenting their properties for sale has evolved over the past decade. These days, to compete in the housing market and get the highest price, it’s no longer good enough to simply have your property clean and tidy, or even renovated. Baking bread and brewing coffee to lure offers just isn’t enough anymore. The way to boost your chances of a quick sale and to beat the competition is by staging your home to sell by engaging a professional home stylist.

However, there are so many home stylists and home stagers cropping up all over Sydney — and since home staging works, it’s not surprising — that the standards all tend to differ. This is why you should check out the stylist’s website for testimonials, review their past work, and choose a company with its own warehouse of furniture and accessories that will cut the costs of hiring it from elsewhere.

How Does Home Staging Boost Sale Prices?

A survey by LJ Hooker found that 98 percent of their agents believed home styling (a.k.a. home staging) a property helped to boost the sale price. LJ Hooker agents also thought home staging influenced a faster sale, and 88 percent believed it helped to generate more bidders at auctions, and multiple offers via private treaty.

More Reasons to Choose Home Styling

Home staging as a strategy to get the most for your property when you put it on the market, whether you’ve decided on an auction or not, should be considered for any of the following reasons:

• By styling your home, the photographs taken will be stunning, attracting more interested buyers who are searching and short-listing advertised properties online.
• Great photographs are more likely to lead to an inspection, which could, in all likelihood, lead to a sale.
• With more interested buyers, the perceived value of your home could be increased and result in several firm offers and a raised sale price.
• If there are some less than attractive features about your property, they would be much more noticeable in an empty room — home staging can distract from them.
• A creative styling of your home could show the best way to use a floor plan. Without such an example, potential buyers could be swayed against making an offer.

A home staging expert is able to style your home using just the right furniture and decorating it with the perfect accessories to make a small room appear larger, and a huge room cosier.

Home Staging Depersonalises the Space

An empty house or one furnished without an eye for detail is much less appealing to potential buyers and professional home styling will also depersonalise the space. A home with family photographs, well-used furniture and a personal ambience can be off-putting to potential buyers. Rather than imagining themselves living in your home, without styling buyers often feel that they are intruding on the owner’s space. This can affect a potential offer.

Target a Specific Demographic With Home Styling

Hiring professionals to stage your home gives you the option of targeting a specific demographic. For instance, if your property is an apartment in Hunters Hill, it might be styled for a retiring couple or empty nesters, but an inner city apartment would be staged for young professionals.

Home styling can also be geared towards tapping into the potential buyer’s feelings to help them become more emotionally invested in your property. Other aspects of home styling include:

• Giving your older property a new lease on life, making it more appealing.
• Selling potential buyers a lifestyle, not only bricks and mortar.
• In a highly competitive market, home styling makes your property stand above the crowd.
• The photography will be stunning and improve the advertising to bring in more viewers.

If your budget is tight and you want to investigate staging your home to sell, you could look at engaging a stylist to work on just a couple of select rooms and concentrate on the main areas such as the kitchen, living room and the master bedroom. Leaving the other rooms empty will cut costs and still give you some of the advantages of home staging. However, your costs should be more than covered.

What to Avoid In a Home Staging

The first thing to avoid in a home styling is staging clichés such as rose petals on the bed, bath towel swans in the bathroom and champagne on the bedside table. An expert home stylist will know to avoid this tackiness, but will also avoid leaving excess belongings in your drawers and cupboards. Potential buyers inspecting homes do open cupboards and drawers so a stylist will make certain this is not overlooked.

Urban Chic has an amazing team of skilled real estate staging professionals who strive to provide the highest standard of customer service and home staging and furniture hire Sydney-wide. If you’re interested in staging your home to sell and want the very best, then look no further than Urban Chic. Call your local Urban Chic home stylist today on (02) 8959 7789 or email info@urbanchic.net.au.

Image courtesy of Zeus