3 Ways Home Staging Can Kill a Sale (and How to Prevent That From Happening)

If you’re like most people who are selling a home in Lakewood or Long Beach, your Realtor® has already talked to you about staging the house and making it as appealing as possible to prospective buyers.

But could staging actually kill your sale?

Yes – and here’s how.

3 Ways Home Staging Can Kill a Sale

We all want buyers to fall in love with our homes – and that’s partly because if they love it, they’ll make an offer. It’s also because it’s a compliment… but if you stage your home the wrong way, your house could end up having the opposite effect on buyers. Here are three ways home staging can kill your sale:

·         Overdesigning

·         Bad scale

·         Too much uniformity

Here are three ways to avoid that and do it all the right way.

#1. Overdesigning: A Terrible Staging Technique

You want your home to look lived in, easy to care for, well-maintained and clean. These are the basic premises of home staging, but you also want it to be decorated just enough that buyers can use their own imaginations to envision their belongings in your space.

If you overdesign, you’ll crowd out prospective buyers’ imaginations and they’ll only be able to see what you’ve done – not the home’s potential or what they could do.

Remember, the house is the star. The décor you use is there to complement it, not dominate it.

Keep things simple and you can’t go wrong.

#2. Keep Everything to Scale

If your furniture is too big for your house, it’s going to look crowded… and if it’s too small, you’re going to make the rooms look like there’s really not enough space to live. That will leave prospective buyers wondering if their normal-sized furniture will even fit in the house.

Everything needs to be proportional, including your décor. If your décor isn’t proportional to the room, you’re going to make it look visually cluttered or visually sparse – both of which are turn-offs for potential buyers.

#3. Spice it up.

Don’t overdo it with the nautical theme, the art-deco style or anything else. If your whole house is uniformly decorated, from the bathrooms and kitchen to the bedrooms and home office, your prospective buyers are going to have a hard time distinguishing between rooms – and they’re not going to be able to envision their stuff in your space.

Uniform design is overwhelming, even when the design is tasteful. Do yourself (and your prospective buyers) a favor and split up rooms by using different themes.

Are You Selling a Home in Lakewood or Long Beach?

If you’re selling a home in Lakewood or Long Beach, we can help. Call us at 562-882-1581 to learn about how we’ll market your property to all the right buyers so you can sell it quickly and at the right price.