As the process of selling your real estate plays out, your inner penny pincher may kick up a fuss when the time comes to shell out money for staging your home. If you’re like most of us, you are busy saving all your cash in order to move into your new house in style after the old one sells. It may seem pointless to furnish and stage your old one. After all, a house is a house is a house, right? No. Sorry. Preparing your house for a successful sale almost always includes furniture hire. Sydney home hunters are insistent upon seeing what a house looks like after the furnishings go in.
There are very good reasons to take the step of furnishing your old home before listing it. Here are a few.
Furnishings Enlarge Rooms
You might think that an empty room says ‘larger’. Wrong again. A room devoid of furniture leaves the buyer wondering if his own furnishings will fit. Just like in crime movies, placing a familiar item like a pen or a dollar bill next to a footprint in the snow gives you a sense of how big the perpetrator of the crime is. Placing furnishings in the room makes it easier to see how much space there is left over.
If your room is a small one, placing the right furnishings – smaller-scale tables, chairs, and sofas – can make the whole place seem much larger. This gives the potential buyer confidence that the room is ample to house his or her stuff.
Where Does the Christmas Tree Go?
Naked rooms are uninspiring. Not only do they fail to give those who view them a sense of perspective, they don’t offer any creative suggestions about how the room might be used. The best example of this is the guest bedroom or office. Without staging, it’s just another empty room. With a few pieces of furnishings it can suddenly become a big selling point for the buyer who has toyed with the idea of working from home. (Insert lightbulb over buyer’s head here.) A bit of staging can also create a guestroom in the same space with clever furniture choices. Suddenly the room is a big extra and all buyers love to get more for their money.
Photo Ready
One of the most important steps in preparing a house for listing is the taking of listing photos. We know that most buyers spend weeks, even months, poring over listing photos online before they actually make the call to an agent. Listing photos will be your house’s first handshake with the new buyer, so naturally you’ll want it to be a reassuring one.
Photographers want furniture in the houses they shoot because – well – furniture makes a home homey. It’s impossible to find much charm in unadorned walls and floors, no matter how shiny they happen to be. Listing photos and the houses that star in them need to demonstrate some personality if they are to capture the attention of potential buyers. The best way to do this is to do at least some furniture hire Sydney.
Nobody Likes Echoes
One rarely hears echoes in pictures, but when the buyer does finally visit your vacant home, the first step in the door creates echoes. The noise that resounds through an empty building works to cause uneasiness in the potential buyer. Maybe it’s because of those crime movies we mentioned earlier….an abandoned warehouse, or a vacant mansion makes us expect ugly surprises at every turn. We humans find big, empty spaces a little intimidating. Nobody buys a house that makes them nervous.
Never lose sight of the fact that your job as a seller is to make the buyer feel at home and comfortable. Unless this happens there is very slim hope for a sale.
Fortunately, in the Sydney area there are companies that provide rental furniture for home sales. Places that do home staging like Urban Chic Property Styling have furniture hire Sydney as part of their services, making it an effortless part of the staging process. A truly successful sale relies upon many things and furnishings are no small part of that equation.
Photo credit: Image courtesy of Globe West.
