When preparing your home for sale, decluttering and depersonalising your space is an important step in the home staging process.
If you want to sell quickly and at the highest price, you need to enable the potential buyers to visualise themselves living in your house. Any visible personal items (e.g. family portraits) would cause friction in their imagination and be a constant reminder that the house they’re looking at belongs to someone else.
“A properly staged house should feel warm, welcoming & homely, without the “footprint” of the previous owner.”
We have put together eight tips on how to depersonalise your home before selling.
1. Understand It’s Not Personal
Removing all the special and important family items may feel like you are removing your home’s personality, or maybe even taking away its charm. We understand. Selling a house is an emotional process, so feeling hesitant when it comes to completely removing personal items is perfectly natural.
That is why it’s important you understand the reason behind depersonalising. It does not mean you have a bad personal taste. You are simply providing the buyers with a “blank canvas”, so they can get a glimpse of living their lifestyle in your home.
2. Start Packing
Get a head start on taking everything off the shelves now. I’s a great opportunity to declutter, giving you enough time to choose what you want to do with your things, instead of frantically chucking everything into bin bags (It’s okay, we’ve all been there!).
TIP: ‘Donate, Discard, Sell or Store’ has proven to be a better strategy (for us personally) than Marie Kondo’s ‘Does it spark joy’ technique. But to each their own, you do whatever rocks your socks…. or declutters your… clutters. Okay, that was bad.
3. Remove Family Photos
This tip may seem obvious, but it’s the most overlooked one. Having family portraits on display may seem warm to you, but the buyers will feel like they are snooping around a strangers’ house and invading their privacy. Take them off, trust us.
TIP: We use picture frames for property staging, because we love the homely feeling they give off. Instead of family portraits, we frame magazine cut-outs of house decorations, trying to match the colour palette or theme we are going for.
4. Choose Neutral Colours
Beige, grey, white or cream colours are appealing to the broadest range of potential buyers, which is what you want, if you want your house sold quickly and for a good price. Use only hints of bright & bold colours to accentuate the overall feel of the room.
Consult your real estate agent, depending on the return of investment ratio, you may need to repaint a bold-coloured wall, strip down the wallpaper or change the carpet.
If renovations are not a financially viable option, these are our tips on decorating around it.
5. Look Out For Controversial Decorations
Remove any potentially offensive items in your household – e.g. nude artwork, religious items, posters containing rude language, etc.
What you find tasteful, funny, or simply a display of your faith, may cause shock and disapproval in others, which is a strong reason to be put off from buying a house.
Yes, it may feel like society has become too precious, but remember – the sale of your largest asset is at stake. Therefore, anything that could be seen as socially, morally, or politically incorrect – be safe and store it away.
6. Erase Any Trace of Your Personal Hobbies
“But… but… what about my awesome collection of action figures?”
Nope. Store it away. That peloton bike, sewing machine and electric guitar too. Anything that could be seen as ‘clutter’ will need to go.
7. Remove All Personal Items
This may sound harsh, but anything that has a hint of “you” needs to be gone before the photographs are taken.
Trophies, toys, books, even cleaning products could be perceived as ‘someone still lives here’, which leads to difficulties in imagining themselves living there.
8. Seek 3rd Party Opinion
If you’ve lived in your home for a longer period of time, you may find the process of depersonalising more difficult than you thought. Your judgement is likely going to be clouded by emotional attachment.
That is why you need someone with a “fresh perspective” to come in and help you identify which items need to go. Remember that buyers’ opinions are formed in the first 15 seconds they walk in.
As Brisbane’s Home-Staging Experts, we can help you ensure that their first impressions will be amazing and your house will be talked about, if not sold during the first open home! (Yes, that happened… many times!)
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