The Difference Between Selling And Dwelling

There is a special mindset associated with “staging” your home to sell in a soft market.

Staging refers simply to the act of improving your home’s appearance in order to appeal to the widest segment of potential buyers. The approach you must adopt is to see your home with an objective eye.

Stop looking at your home as your “home,” and start visualizing it as the “product” that it becomes when it enters the market. Both a real estate agent and a professional home stager can help to market your product successfully by highlighting positive features and downplaying less attractive aspects.

Since you may have a strong emotional attachment to your home, you might not fully appreciate hearing about a better way to show your offering, but try to recognize that the way you decorate to sell may be quite different from the way you decorate to dwell. The appearance of a space often trumps its functionality when impressing buyers.

Your goal is to sell quickly at a fair price. A survey by a large national real estate brokerage showed that staged homes sell in half the time and another survey of REALTORS showed that a $500 “staging” investment recouped 343% of that cost. So be prepared to swallow a little pride, move some furniture and field better offers on the road to your successful sale.

Patricia Dalmazio is a Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker with 20 years of experience in the Real Estate field. If you have any questions, please call her at
516.944.2877 or email: Patricia.Dalmazio@Elliman.com