The Real Estate Stylist and You — A Matter of Trust
As you prepare to sell your home, you may be filled with feelings of nostalgia and notice tugs to your heartstrings. Leaving a home behind can feel like losing an old and treasured friend. As a matter of fact, when scientists list the most stressful events in a person’s life, the events associated with moving – getting a new job, getting a new mortgage, losing old friends, etc are right up there with the death of a loved one. Because these life-changing events can be challenging all by themselves, the busy-work of getting your home ready to list can be overwhelming. Enter the real estate stylist!
We always recommend that you find a home stager in whom you have confidence and with whom you can communicate. This person will be advising you about precisely how to turn this major asset – your home – into money in your pocket. Your stager won’t see the memories you do when walking through the structure. Your stager sees the house as something entirely different than you do. That’s a good thing. Your emotional ties to the home can hold your home sale back, so following the advice of your stager is critical. Trusting your home stager can turn this conflicted time into something far less stressful.
It could be said that the more time you’ve spent in a home, the more you need the help of a stager. The real estate stylist will suggest these things first:
• Disengage
• Declutter and depersonalise
• Repair and replace
• Clean, clean, and clean again
• Stand back and watch the magic show
When the first two items are finished and your personal things are out of the picture, you will find it much easier to see your house as an asset about to be liquidated. Until then, you may resist the changes your home stylist will suggest. For example, your stager will suggest you repaint your home in a colour scheme that is comprised of neutrals. The reasons for this are fairly simple. Not everybody loves a yellow kitchen or a lavender bedroom. Your home stylist wants to make your home appeal to as many people as possible, and at the very least not ‘turn buyers off’ with colours that are too dramatic. Your home wants to achieve a sophisticated look to which just about anybody can relate.
The styling company you’ve chosen will give you a ‘to-do’ list that may include repairs that need attention. Common repairs necessary are fixing a noisy kitchen vent fan, or replacing a garbage disposal unit that hasn’t worked for years. The little problems or inconveniences you have learned to live with will probably not impress your new buyer favourably.
Your stylist may counsel you to upgrade appliances or throw away your heavy damask curtains. Professional home stagers have been around long enough to know precisely what your potential buyers want and don’t want. Every demographic associated with buyers has a particular profile. Based on how big your home is, where it is situated, and in what price range it is listed, there is a fairly accurate profile of the people who will ultimately buy your house. Your stager is simply rearranging your home’s atmosphere to make the buyer sit up and take notice.
When your home is perfectly clean and in tip-top shape maintenance wise, your stager will do the staging magic by filling the home with furniture, art and décor designed to appeal to the buyer. The furniture choices may be poles apart from the way you furnished the home, but remember, this is no longer about your home. It’s about the house somebody else is going to fall in love with, move into, and make memories of their own in.
Totally trusting the real estate stylist may be difficult at first but, in the end, it will make sense to you. Property styling is equal parts science and art. Your stylist, being a professional at dressing homes to sell, knows best. That is, of course, if you’ve chosen a stylist whose reputation and experience you trust. You wouldn’t try to advise your surgeon about how to remove your gall bladder. Your relationship with your stylist is very much the same. Allowing your home staging company to do their magic in your home will net you a bigger dollar amount at sale. Trust us. It’s worth all the emotional effort in the end.