Ignore Your Own Taste When Prepping a Home for Sale

Everybody loves their own tastes, which certainly makes sense when you think about it. However, prepping and staging a home to achieve the highest possible sales price is both an art and a science. Problems arise when Sellers allow their own style preferences to influence the decisions they make when selling a home. This can be an expensive mistake.

A well-staged home will feel open and airy, not cold and sparse. It will be neutral, not boring. Attractive, not stylized. Remember that there is a fundamental difference between the way a home looks when it is staged to sell for top dollar, and the way a home looks while it is lived in. Staging is part of the marketing cost of the home, and it helps homes sell for more money. And of course, DeLeon Realty pays for the staging of all our listings so that we can achieve the highest possible sales price for the Seller.

Similarly, a home should be prepped in a way that will appeal to the greatest number of Buyers. Broken items should be repaired if not cost-prohibitive, and the home’s palette should be updated to colors that are modern, but not overly trendy. Generally, more attention should be paid to superficial items that impact the visual appeal of the property, rather than to major system upgrades.

The objective of home prep, just like staging, is to maximize return on investment and achieve the highest net sales price. DeLeon Realty’s interior designers have a keen eye for improvements that cost little, but make a huge impact. Homeowners, on the other hand, tend to select more expensive items because they look at the items in isolation, rather than as parts of the big picture. While this can add unnecessary expense, the true cost comes in the form of a lower sales price if the Sellers’ style preference results in a final product that appeals only to a small portion of the market.

Home prep and staging can make a measurable difference in the final sales price. That is why every DeLeon listing engagement begins with a “design appointment,” which includes our interior designer, in-house contractor, video scriptwriter, and me.