The two top priorities for home sellers are ensuring that their property sells quickly and that they maximize their selling price (ie: equity) during the sale.

At StagingWorks, we believe that there are five key factors that determine how successful your home sale will be. These factors include:
* The prevailing market conditions
* Your location
* Your asking price
* The home presentation
* Your choice of realtor

Generally speaking, the market conditions when you sell and your current property’s location are factors beyond your control.

Elements more within your control are the asking price, how your home presents to potential buyers and choosing an effective realtor.

In this post, we’ll touch on the benefits home staging provides as an effective marketing tool to ensure that your home presents well to potential buyers.

The top five benefits professional home staging provides to Toronto sellers include:

1) Higher impact marketing material – which draw more showings

Staged homes present better in MLS photos, feature sheets and other marketing material. Higher impact photos create an immediate good impression and draw more showings.

2) Differentiation from competitive listings

Don’t forget that you have competition. Buyers have options. To effectively differentiate your listing, your home should ideally show better than alternative listings at the same asking price. Home staging ensure thay this occurs.

3) Sell for more

Think about it. It just makes sense. Buyers are looking for a property that they feel is “move in ready”. When buyers connect with your home, asking price typically becomes a secondary consideration.

On the other hand, if buyers feel that the home requires work, but the asking price has not been reduced accordingly, they will be expected a significant price reduction. You can take this issue off the table by ensuring your home looks its best and shows to its full potential.

4) Sell faster

Statistics show that staged homes sell on average twice as fast as homes that are not staged. A property that shows better attracts more buyers and increases the likelihood of selling more quickly.

5) Get peace of mind

Rest easy knowing that your home shows to its full potential.  Now, look forward to negotiation and closing the deal.

Independent of market conditions, home staging is a highly effective marketing tool used to maximize the selling price of homes and condos.  

StagingWorks is the premier Toronto home staging services company.  We provide a complete range of professional services which include vacant home staging, occupied home staging and condo staging.  We have staging packages to accommodate most budgets and serve Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas.

Please visit our home staging portfolio for more samples of our staging projects.  Give us some some details on your home and when you’re planning to sell, and get a free home staging estimate.   Or, call us for a free estimate at (647) 409-2091 or anne@StagingWorks.ca.

StagingWorks has been voted Toronto’s top home stager by Toronto Life.

See the following link for the 10 best secrets for selling your Toronto home:

http://www.stagingworks.ca/home-staging-toronto-blog/10-best-kept-secrets-for-selling-your-home/

Independent of market conditions, home staging is a highly effective marketing tool used to maximize the selling price of homes and condos.  

StagingWorks is the premier Toronto home staging services company.  We provide a complete range of professional services which include vacant home staging, occupied home staging and condo staging.  We have staging packages to accommodate most budgets and serve Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas.

Please visit our home staging portfolio for more samples of our staging projects.  Give us some some details on your home and when you’re planning to sell, and get a free home staging estimate.   Or, call us for a free estimate at (647) 409-2091 or anne@StagingWorks.ca.

StagingWorks has been voted Toronto’s top home stager by Toronto Life.

 The following article by Jennifer Wilson-Speedy was published recently in the Toronto Star and contains some great tips.

Thanks to a record number of “Sold” signs going up around the GTA in April, many homeowners are choosing real estate over renovating to achieve their dream home.

“I think people have confidence right now,” says realtor David Visentin of Love It or List It (Mondays at 9 p.m. and Thursdays at 11 p.m. on the W Network). We’re “seeing a lot more coming out on the market right now.”

In fact, Visentin, who handles the “list it” portion of the show, says it’s a “fantastic time” to sell in most parts of the city.

While eager sellers may be ready to stick that sale sign on the lawn immediately, Visentin cautions that even in a great market, it’s still important to do the legwork before letting potential buyers into your home.

The first step, he says, is for would-be sellers to consider their current situation and what comes next. “Think about what they want, where they are going to go . . . what they need to get out of their home,” he advises.

Once your priorities and plans for your future home are firmly in place, it’s time to focus on your current space. Start by finding out what your home is worth, suggests Visentin. “That usually takes getting three opinions of value,” he says. “A lot of people only get one (but) even if you decide on the realtor you’re going to use, get two more.”

Three sets of comparables “gives you a better chance of really understanding what your house is worth,” he explains. While you may end up with three copies of the same information, you could also get a better picture of what’s been sold recently in your neighbourhood and what buyers are looking for.

“The more information you can get, the better off you are,” he says, adding that you shouldn’t take anything into consideration that was sold more than a year ago.

A real estate agent you can trust is also key. When chatting with potential agents, “You need to question them a little bit. Find out where they sell, how long they’ve been selling in that area,” he says. Look for someone with experience who you feel you can trust, and who is also knowledgeable, prepared to negotiate on your behalf and is going to be there when you need them, suggests Visentin, noting that you don’t want to miss out on a home showing or offer presentation because your realtor is not available.

But the biggest mistake sellers make is “listing your home when it isn’t ready to be listed . . . when it doesn’t look the way it should.”

Even in a bustling market, you still want to make your home look as good as it can, he says, noting that even if you’re going to get six or seven offers, it’s worth putting in the extra effort to push all those offers a little higher — meaning your home might sell for thousands more.

And he says, “there are ways of making your home look better without spending money.” Perhaps the most important of these is decluttering.

“So many people don’t do it,” he says, telling the story of a home with beautiful kitchen counters covered with stuff. Despite the kitchen being fairly large, the clutter made his clients fear it wouldn’t be functional for them, so he ended up actually doing some clearing up during the showing to help give them a better idea of the space.

In addition to clutter making a space feel smaller, “People need to look at wall space, where they can put stuff – not where you put it,” he explains. Plus, “people fall in love with (the seller’s) stuff, and that leaves with them, so there’s no point leaving it out.”

Finally, he says, “always be out of the house. That doesn’t mean stay in the basement, that means get out.” He says that buyers tend to rush through the home when the owners are there. He also suggests you avoid talking to prospective buyers, because, if all goes well, this is a person you’re going to be negotiating with and you don’t want it to get personal. Instead, he says, “Let the real estate agent do their job.”

StagingWorks is the premier Toronto home staging services company.  We provide a complete range of professional services which include vacant home staging, occupied home staging and condo staging.  We have staging packages to accommodate most budgets and serve the GTA and surrounding areas.

Please visit our home staging portfolio for more samples of our staging projects.  Give us some some details on your home and when you’re planning to sell and get a free home staging estimate.   Or, contact us for a free estimate at (647) 409-2091 or anne@StagingWorks.ca.

The family photos had to go and the walls needed painting. After three decades in the same home, feelings were bound to run deep. (Karen Alton - Globe and Mail)

Back in the sixties, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross codified the five stages of grief to help us cope with the loss of a loved one. Recently, I discovered that the emotional turmoil of home staging plays out in a weirdly similar fashion. Trust me, there is a thin line between grief and interior decorating for a quick sale.

In both cases the first stage is shock and denial: What? Pictures of my family are not captivating to prospective home buyers?

Then comes anger: Are you kidding? We just painted the living room and dining room and front hall last year! Followed closely by bargaining: Okay. Fine. But if we strip the wallpaper, can we please, please, keep the blue walls?

Depression comes next: My whole life in this house has been a sham, so full of colour and memorabilia. Finally, there is acceptance. Reality crystallizes, you roll up your sleeves and sweat equity kicks in.

Sentiment aside, as with most people, our house is our biggest asset, our biggest investment. My husband and I needed the money out of our three-bedroom bungalow to move on with our lives post-retirement.

But having lived for 30 years in the same home, we were new to the not-so-gentle art of primping your house for the real estate market. We quickly learned there is a simple formula to the task of beautifying the old manse.

First, your house must be dehumanized (family photos packed away), decluttered and cleaned vigorously. Then it must be polished to a hard, minimalist shine with the walls painted, wallpaper stripped and furniture removed to reveal hardwood floors. Only then should the For Sale sign go on the lawn.

This is what the magazines reported and it’s what the professionals told us. We might be perfectly content living in our crowded, shabby nest (in fact we were), but if we wanted top dollar, in a timely fashion, we had better get out the rubber gloves, because the spiders on the windowsill and the clutter in the closets must go.

Clearly, our home stager had a practical eye. She waltzed through our house and suggested we repaint every room (except the powder room), replace all the wallpaper and ship out half our worldly goods to parts unspecified.

“You want prospective buyers to imagine their own stuff in the rooms,” she said, and prescribed neutral tones with names like Manchester Tan and Trendy Biscotti for the walls.

The colours were meant to create a contemporary feel, she wrote in her five-page report, “while adding warmth and spaciousness.” We knew she meant more warmth and an illusion of space to make the house show well and sell successfully, but as we were still then fixated on stage one (shock and denial), stripped down and tarted up is what we read between the lines.

Our real estate broker, a lovely woman who is also an old friend, was sympathetic. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “I felt like we were prostituting our own home when we sold it. It was rough. All I can say is, it works.”

I gave her three days to sell my house. We both laughed. She promised fresh flowers for the table. Did I mention the rule of three? Fresh flowers, fresh fruit and fresh baking – these are the sensual treats designed to complete any seduction, er, transaction.

So, the mop and the paintbrush came out, and a series of difficult choices reared their ugly heads: What goes into storage and what goes straight to the dump? Soul-destroying hardly covers it.

Even at stage five (acceptance), after three decades in the same home, feelings are bound to run deep. Would you throw away a pair of slippers just when they got comfortable? We grew to love our house with its rooms painted Chopin Blue and Wooded Path Green.

Thirty years is a long time to inhabit any dwelling in this transient world, but still I never dreamed it would be so difficult to entrust our house to professionals who must focus on the imperfections, not the context. Instead of a cozy family home they saw the dated wallpaper and quirky art and towering trees in the yard that only yesterday, it seems, were saplings bending in the wind.

But this was no time to get maudlin. The kids had married and moved on, with homes of their own. The dog was long dead. We have grandchildren, for heaven’s sake. My husband and I built a retirement home in a village in the country, a place where we can live the next phase of our lives, 30 years if we are lucky, close to nature in relative tranquillity.

There will be fewer stoplights (one, in fact), less pollution and a host of opportunities to play and display our quirks and idiosyncrasies before another home stager gets our call.

I guess you could say we finally achieved closure in our five stages of grief. Our house sold in two days.

StagingWorks is the premier Toronto home staging services company.  We provide a complete range of professional services which include vacant home staging, occupied home staging and condo staging.  We have staging packages to accommodate most budgets and serve downtown Toronto and the GTA.

Please visit our home staging portfolio for more samples of our staging projects.  Give us some some details on your home and when you’re planning to sell and get a free home staging estimate.   Or, contact us for a free estimate at (647) 409-2091 or anne@StagingWorks.ca.

StagingWorks is Toronto’s premier home staging services company and offers a complete range of professional staging services to accommodate most budgets.  We service the GTA and surrounding areas.  Please visit our home staging portfolio for samples of our work.

The Designs for Living Home and Garden Show is March 12th – 14th in Hamilton.  For more information, visit http://www.thehomeshow.ca/.