Get over staging fright to help sell your home Furniture

For Joe Hayden, a real estate agent in Louisville, Kentucky, staging is on his must-do list for sellers.

“Staging is so important,” says Hayden, who’s been in the business for more than 12 years. “We want buyers to be able to create an emotional relationship to the house and think it’s their home.”

That’s even more relevant at a time when most people begin house-hunting on their smartphones.

A seller’s listing photograph has to be “amazing” because that’s the first engagement people have with their property, Hayden says.

Here are tips for presenting your home in the best light:

De-clutter and clean

De-cluttering and cleaning top the list of home-improvement tasks realtors recommend to their clients, according to the NAR study.

Without spending a ton of money, get your house clean, “from ceiling to floor, and wash the windows from both inside and outside,” says Caroline Harmon, trends and style analyst for retailer Lowe’s. “It will give your whole house a fresh pop. The more you can de-clutter or simplify, the easier it will be to sell your house.”.

Depersonalize

The No. 1 advice Hayden gives to sellers: “Get out of the seller mind-set and pretend you are a buyer and objectively criticize your own home as a buyer. Think of those things that will block someone from having a relationship with the house,” he says. “

Light and color

Making sure that lights work and match in each room is important. It also is critical to replace those compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulbs that take a long time to brighten, says Hayden, the Louisville real estate agent.

It’s critical to rearrange furniture so that people don’t see the back of a couch when they walk in, Hayden says. “You want to have ... a path to navigate the house without walking into a barrier.”