As you sit down to read this blog, you may be trying to make up your mind about how you will go about selling your house. There are so many decisions to make. Will you stay in the house while it is listed? Will you move your things into storage and stay with friends while you wait for the house to sell? What can you expect in either case? It’s a trying time for you and you’re wondering how your budget and your family will survive this experiment in property presentation. Sydney home sellers are often overwhelmed by these same questions.

From our perspective, we always hope that home sellers have decided to vacate the house, leaving it a totally clean slate upon which the house staging specialists can create an image of the perfect home. That isn’t always practical, we understand, but it is the best plan.

If you think you cannot possibly move out of the house while it is listed, you will have a bigger nut to crack than most sellers. We don’t want to discourage you from making this step upward toward a new and improved life, but you do need to understand that living in a listed house can be hard to say the least.

All the work that is necessary to prepare your house for sale makes living in it extraordinarily difficult and the work of moving, doubly hard. For example, you have to take the pictures down from the walls in order to paint then you will have to decide which (if any) of those pieces of art will go back up to impress buyers.

You will still need to depersonalise your house just as you would if a stager was coming to totally re-do everything. Family photos will have to be stored away as will all the artwork on the refrigerator. Your job will be to make the house look as if the buyers could take possession later today. Buyers want ‘move-in ready’ – a very tall order when you’re still in residence.

Prospective buyers feel uncomfortable in a house that obviously belongs to somebody else. Some of them walk around the house as if the carpeting were eggshells. They don’t open wardrobe doors or peek around corners – in short, they don’t get a good sense of how the house will work for them. The other extreme is just as bad. These people open every dresser drawer and poke around in your refrigerator as if they were fixing a bedtime snack.

Buyers will look under beds and into bathroom cabinetry, so the personal clutter every family creates must be corralled and subdued at all times. Does this sound impossible? That’s because it is. Living in a listed house may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done and we recommend it only as the very last resort.

If selling your house is important and you want to do it quickly and profitably, you will be so much better off if you find a way to move your family totally out of the house during the sale process.

The best news is, by moving out and leaving the transformation in the hands of a gifted home stylist your sale will take a much shorter span of time. Statistics prove that professionally staged homes sell more quickly than unstaged ones – sometimes in days rather than months. This happens because selling agents have unfettered access to the house. They can show it in the middle of the night if such a schedule fits the buyer, so the viewing of your house is not limited.

When you’ve taken the necessary steps to spectacular property presentation Sydney sales agents get very excited. A well-staged house gets twice or three times the viewings as an unstaged one. Selling agents want to make a sale, of course, and a house with the WOW factor is more likely to earn them a bigger commission.

We know how difficult preparing to sell a house can be. Before you settle on living in your house while it is listed, do a bit more budget crunching. Being stuck with a house that lingers on the market for months is a big expense – chances are, those expenses may be double what the cost would have been for ideal property presentation. Sydney home sellers can enjoy a bigger profit when they invest wisely in a good sales strategy.

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