Are you curious about the best methods for staging your vacation home for sale? Whether you are selling your vacation home or your primary home that is located in a tourist area, you need to prepare it for the right buyer. Marketing it correctly is paramount if you want to sell it to the highest bidder and boost your profit. Moreover, you need to stage your home using the best, and most affordable, methods possible.
What is Staging all About?
Home staging is the process of increasing your home value by doing minor changes to the décor, furniture and appearance. Practically, it involves cleaning the home, removing the clutter, improving the landscaping, painting a room or two, adding plants, changing furniture and buying some unique decorations to sparkle buyers’ attention.
Staging is not decorating, but more like depersonalizing your house. While it can be done all by yourself, you can also hire a home stager to help you out. If you want to save some money and do-it-yourself, you can stage your vacation home for sale using these 7 important tips. Check them out below and get your home ready for sale in 2020 and beyond!
7 Tips on Staging Your Vacation Home for Sale
1. Make the Interiors Look Larger by Cutting out Decorations
Vacation home buyers love to see de-cluttered homes that they can decorate as they see fit. They want to have as much space as possible so they feel relaxed and forget about the busyness of life in the big city. A surefire way to increase the appeal of your home is to ensure it looks de-cluttered and large. For that, you want to remove any needless decorations.
Get rid of everything that might communicate potential buyers that you are the owner of the house. Buyers need to be able to picture themselves in your home.
You should have zero personal decorations, but only add some stylish decorations featuring motifs that trigger relaxation and well-being. For example, a landscape painting or a cheap figurative art piece can enhance the appeal of a room without adding any tint of personalization.
2. Hire a Cleaning Company
When selling a vacation home, it is important to ensure that it looks clean and elegant. If you haven’t visited it in months its even more important to undergo a thorough cleaning beforehand. When potential buyers walk into a home, they want to see a spotless home with no visible signs of recent use.
That’s why it’s always a great idea to hire a professional house cleaning company that can clean your home and make it look exceptional, even if you’re not there. They can clean the backyard, front garden, patios, interior, and even your pool.
3. Create a Unique Bedroom Buyers will Love
The bedroom might be the single most important room for married couples, especially if they want to leave their kids behind when going on vacation. All vacationers want to spend quality time together, including relaxing in the bedroom reading a book, watching TV and sleeping.
The best way to ensure that they will enjoy a relaxing holiday and forget about all of their worries is to upgrade the bedroom. Make your bedroom look as appealing as possible by investing in plush pillows, new bedding and high-quality comforters.
4. Entice Potential Buyers with a Gorgeous Dining Room Table
Most of the time, sellers forger that potential buyers need to be enticed. In order to make a successful sale, you need to ensure that the centerpiece of your home, which is the dining table, looks perfect. Buyers notice everything, including those unopened letters or toys on the dining table.
Put out the best china on the table, add centerpieces, bring in some wine glasses & wine and even decorate it with candles. If you have an outdoor dining table, you can enhance it with bread baskets, flower vases and wine buckets.
After you have finished the presentation, spend some time at the dining table with your guests and drink some good wine. You might just convince them on the spot to buy your vacation home!
5. Patch and Repair
During the home staging process, you need to invest some time and energy into repairing your vacation home. Considering that you may not spend a lot of time in your vacation home, you might not be aware of all the cracks, holes, nicks and scratches inside or outside of it.
Start by removing any scuffs from the walls and continue moving around using caulk, paint, spackle and good old TLC to ensure your property looks at its best.
6. Focus on Being Fresh
Never overemphasize your home décor and try not to overwhelm your visitors with too many features and add-ons. Instead, keep things fresh and leverage the power of well-placed flowers and plants. Space out a few plants and flowers in order to avoid clutter and to maximize space.
A practical thing you can do is to place a vase of fresh flowers right on your kitchen table or dining table. You can also add a few potted plants in your living room, bedroom or bathroom. However, if you are not within close proximity of the location or you don’t have time to prepare for the visit, you can always use fake plants as a replacement.
Another important aspect of being fresh is that there are no odors in the home. Make sure there are no lingering smells that might trigger certain negative feelings in your guests. Of course, the trash bin should be emptied and the sink should have no dirty dishes in it. If you feel a subtle scent inside your home, you can use a small scented plug-in that smells of lilies, frangipani or primrose to cover it.
7. Rearrange the Furniture
Lastly, you can dramatically boost the appeal of your vacation home if you rearrange the furniture in such a way so that there is as much walkable, open space as possible. By putting the furniture together, you’ll not only maximize space and make the home look bigger, but you’ll also enable the buyers to better visualize each piece of furniture.
Ensure that you throw away or hide damaged, insignificant furniture pieces, and only keep those that can leave a good first impression.
Staging your vacation home for sale using these tips will no doubt improve your chances of a successful sale. Be sure to also check out our other resources for sellers of vacation homes here.