REAL ESTATE TOPICS...Is Your Home Staged for Every Season?

By Courtney Soinski

If you’re preparing your house to sell and don’t know where to start, you’re not alone.  Even the experts understand that it can be overwhelming.  Thankfully, there are many tips, guidelines, and resources to help you along the way.  As you venture out into the housing market, you’ll find that home staging is an integral part of the selling process.  Updating your home in different seasons throughout the year can improve your chances of sparking a buyer’s interest.

Some home staging techniques have the same impact no matter what time of the year, but there are also many season-specific ways you can stage your home that are more effective in buyer persuasion and attraction, without them even realizing it.

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Here are some seasonal home staging tips to take advantage of:

1. Summer:  In the summer, your house may get cluttered with trees, plants, and the seasonal humidity makes your yard look out of control.  To calm down the summer chaos, trim plants to reach the bottom of the window.  Do not use any hanging plants on your patio because you want their eye to go to the house, not the plants.  You should also stage the backyard as an outdoor living area in the warmer months.  Don’t be afraid to spend the extra money on A/C – Make sure the inside of your house is cool, or else buyers won’t stick around very long, which means they won’t buy.
2. Fall:  The season of Fall brings us many things, including lots of leaves.  Make sure you keep the house exterior nice and neat by raking up all those extra leaves in the front yard and trim greenery as needed. Halloween and Thanksgiving come around during Fall, but don’t go overboard with the decorations.  Remember that less is more when it comes to staging your home to sell.
3. Winter:  Now we come to our current season, Winter.  The rule mentioned above in Summer for your house’s interior temperature also applies here, but in the opposite sense.  You’ll want to spend the extra money on your heating bill if you want home shoppers to stay and look around, feel comfortable, and potentially buy.  It also gets dark earlier in the Winter, so make sure you keep lighting in mind – putting timers around the inside and outside is a great solution.  Keep the holiday decoration down to a minimum so it doesn’t distract buyers from the actual house.
4. Spring:  Spring means bright colors, and that’s what buyers will be attracted to, especially once it brightens up the rainy weather that usually comes with Spring.  Place seasonal flowers in pots on your front porch and make sure all of your holiday lights and decorations are down and put away.  Also, keep up with trimming the weeds and make sure there are no cracks in your driveway so people don’t trip, especially if women are wearing heels.  Lastly, keeping light coming into every room of your house is a sure way to appeal to buyers’ senses.

Apply these small alterations throughout your home to fit the seasons of Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring to make a huge difference on how you attract buyers.  It’s time to cut the strings of attachment by turning your home into a house and your house into a product.  Only then will you see results.