2. If you’re about to put your home on the
market, understand you are about to engage in
a war of sorts. Selling your home is a battle
with other listings for the qualified buyers that
are out there, a battle with everything else a
buyer has to do for their time and attention
and a battle with every other thing they could
be spending their money on.
3. 1. Conduct a recon mission. The Army Field
Manual defines reconnaissance as “a mission to
obtain information by visual observation or other
detection methods, about the activities and
resources of an enemy or potential enemy.” As a
seller-to-be, your recon mission is simple: to scope
out the competition. As soon as you start thinking
about selling, you should be getting out to visit the
other homes in your competitive bracket - the other
homes that your home’s likely buyer will also likely
see - during their Open Houses.
4. 2. Create your plan of attack. To win this home-
selling war, you must attend to the basics of home
staging systematically, creating a comprehensive,
written plan for everything from your home’s
landscaping, the exterior and interior finish
materials (paint, carpets, etc.) and every individual
room of your home, including what you’ll do with
your personal property and what furniture and
decorative items will be used to stage the place.
This plan, of course, must be created and carried
out in the context of whether you plan to reside in
the home while it is on the market, and in the
context of your Realtors recommendations about
how quickly you need to be able to have the place
buyer-ready when you get a viewing request.
5. 3. Deploy the stealth tactic of demolition. Turns
out, some of the most powerful staging techniques
are simply removing, demolishing and otherwise
getting rid of unsighly features, versus adding or
strategically enhancing them. This is especially
critical to keep in mind if you are staging your home
on a shoestring budget - rather than trying to figure
out how you’ll come up with the cash to buy a bunch
of new things, focus first on whether there’s
anything you can remove that will enhance a buyer’s
experience of your home.
6. 4. Pre-pack. The call to de-clutter is the rallying
cry of virtually every stager. By that, they mean
to clear countertops, floors, table-tops and
every other surface in the home of as much of
the minutae of living as humanly possible. All
that should remain is the occasional decorative
or functional piece - a clock here, a vase of
flowers there - and even these things only to the
extent that they jive with the staging plan.
7. 5. Wash, rinse and repeat. The sort of cleaning
you need to execute before you list your home is
not like any cleaning you might ever have done
before. It is not like ‘friends are coming for dinner’
cleaning, where the bedrooms don’t count. It’s it
not like ‘white-gloved mother-in-law is on her way
cleaning,’ where you can enlist the kids to run
interference and distract her with the power of
their cuteness. It even trumps ‘cleaning lady is
coming’ cleaning, because you want her to feel
needed, so can’t leave the place pristine before she
comes - that would look like you were trying too
hard!
8. 6. Fixate on trims and details. It’s tempting,
when staging, to do the big jobs - painting the
walls, polishing the floors, moving and removing
furniture - and to run out of steam and cash
before the little details get handled.
9. 7. Be brutally honest with yourself. When you
think you’re done preparing your home, think
again. It’s not overkill to go out on a Sunday
afternoon, walk through a few Open Houses, get
back in the car and drive up to your house,
walking through it exactly the way a buyer
would. Ask yourself: What can you edit? What
looks like clutter? What is distracting? What
stops a buyer from seeing the possibilities for
their own family here?
10. Sellers: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve run
into in the course of getting your home ready for
sale?
Buyers: What are the things you’re seeing,
staging-wise, that are very effective in making a
home desirable to you?
11. Randy Bett
Investment Realtor/Author/Investor
Real Estate Professionals Inc.
Better Group Real Estate
202-5403 Crowchild Trail NW
Calgary, AB T3B 4Z1
Phone:403-774-7464 Ext:1
Fax:403-208-0082
Toll Free fax:888-711-6801
