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STARR C. OSBORNE is owner and founder of Tailored Transitions, Philadelphia's premiere home staging, moving-management, and design company.

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Do you want to sell your home at a premium price -- now? If you want to sell it fast, and for more money, you need to stage--that is, you need to package your home in a way that emphasizes its strengths, downplays its weaknesses, and immediately appeals to prospective buyers. According to 91% of realtors, home staging is the way to go. But you don't need to pay a professional thousands of dollars to give your home a strategic makeover. In "Home Staging That Works," you'll learn all the secrets, tricks, and techniques of the trade. Staging is all about making a spectacular first impression on a buyer, and staging expert Starr C. Osborne gives you step-by-step, room-by-room instructions on what to do, keep, toss, fix, paint, replace, avoid, update, show, hide, highlight, and more. First, she teaches you how to see what a buyer sees. (Beware: that buyer will probably notice more about your house in 30 seconds than you've noticed in the last two years.) Then, she shows you how to make your home look big, bright, warm, and welcoming--in short, everything the buyer has been looking for. In "Home Staging That Works," you'll learn how to: Focus on your potential buyers' tastes (not your own). Create curb appeal. Drive Internet interest with photos that flatter your home. De-clutter and pre-pack at the same time. Clean and repair your home without spending a fortune. Keep your home sale-ready-without being afraid to live in it. Packed with bulleted "must-do" lists, real-home examples, and 65 photos-many "before and after"-to illustrate the dramatic difference staging makes, "Home Staging That Works" demonstrates how easy and rewarding it can be to redesign your home for the ideal buyer. Starr C. Osborne is owner and founder of Tailored Transitions, one of the nation's premier home staging, interior design, and moving-management companies. Visit her website at www.tailoredtransitions.com and her blog and tweets at StagingStarr.

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Home Staging That Works

AMACOM

Contents

FEATURES.......................................................xiiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................xvINTRODUCTION...................................................xviiCHAPTER ONE STAGING FOR THE RIGHT AUDIENCE.....................1CHAPTER TWO FIRST IMPRESSIONS..................................23CHAPTER THREE CREATING SPACE...................................55CHAPTER FOUR WHAT TO FIX AND HOW TO CLEAN......................95CHAPTER FIVE SETTING THE STAGE.................................129CHAPTER SIX PRESENTING YOUR HOME TO BUYERS.....................179INDEX..........................................................193

Chapter One

That you may please others you must be forgetful of yourself. —Ovid

OVER THE YEARS, you have lived in your home, designed it, furnished it, and maintained it to reflect your taste. In sum, your home is tailored perfectly for you. Unfortunately, the people who will be looking at your home during the selling process are not you. Not only are your prospective buyers likely to be younger than you, but their tastes, experiences, and expectations are guaranteed to be different from yours. And these elusive buyers are looking for their dream home. If you can transform your property into one that fits a buyer's dreams, you can sell your home. To do this, you need to figure out who your most likely buyers are and then stage your home according to what that group of people is most likely to want.

What Is Staging?

Staging your home means transforming it to appeal to your most likely buyers. Staging is not decorating. Decorating applauds and enhances individual taste; staging removes individual taste, catering instead to the design sense and dreams of your most likely group of buyers. Changing your dcor to sell your home does not mean that your existing scheme is not chic. I find myself telling some clients that their dcor is too sophisticated for the market. You don't want to scare those likely buyers away. In fact, changing your dcor during the staging process does not mean that it is bad in any way. All it means is that your dcor is designed for you—as it should be. But you aren't buying your own home; you're trying to sell it.

In essence, staging is product packaging. You are packaging your property so that when your prospective buyers walk through it, they can envision themselves living the life they want to live, in the home they've been looking for. If you simply clean your home beautifully, perhaps tucking some of your most personal possessions out of sight, you've made a step in the right direction. However, you're nowhere near ready to put your home on the market because your home is still packaged to appeal most to you.

When buyers approach your home, whether via an Internet photo or in person, their analytical side may be in control. They probably have practical questions in mind. Does this home have enough bedrooms? How many bathrooms does it have? Is it heated by gas, electric, or oil? Is it within my price range?

But buyers are also looking to fall in love with a new home. If you can appeal to your potential buyers' dreams and desires, if you can show them an idealized version of how life could be in this space, you can sell your property. With the right staging, analytical buyers can be wooed and transformed into emotional buyers. Emotional buyers want to fall in love with the home they will buy, and they will use all their analytical reasoning to support their decision. Give them the dream of how they want to live. Help your prospective buyers fall in love with your property, because if they fall in love, they'll feel they need to buy it.

Out with the "You": Disengaging from Your Home

The first step in staging your home is one of the hardest: taking the "you" out of your home in order to transform it into a property that speaks to the desires of your most likely buyers. Essentially, you must depersonalize your home, and, to do this, you have to be ready to say good-bye to the time you've spent there. I tell my clients that their emotional moving day is the day that staging begins. As the seller, you need to begin to emotionally disengage from your home now. To prepare yourself for the day when your property is no longer your own personal cocoon, remind yourself that your home is a product that you need to package effectively to sell for the highest price.

SAYING GOOD-BYE TO YOUR HOME

Staging is uncomfortable. It runs contrary to the deeply held notion that our home is our castle, our refuge, the place from which we can hold the world at bay. Perhaps more significantly, staging goes against the cultural messaging that our very essence is somehow wrapped up in our homes and our possessions. In our quest to carve out a psychic space for ourselves in this world, our homes become a manifestation of who we are. If we extricate ourselves from our home, are we abandoning part of ourselves? What happens to the history we've lived through in our home? Most of all, if we depersonalize our home, aren't we taking the charm out of it? Won't it feel too cold and empty to appeal to any buyer?

Staging does nullify your taste, and that reality can be hard to accept. On the other hand, staging gives your prospective buyers what they really want: their taste. As uncomfortable as staging is, it is also lucrative. You'll find that it pays to stage.

Before you begin the staging process, honor your home the way it is now. This may sound silly, but a formal good-bye to your property will help you become ready to change it ruthlessly from the home you love into the home of your buyers' dreams. I often remind my clients: You are saying good-bye to your property, not what it represents.

FIVE WAYS TO SAY GOOD-BYE

Here are five things you can do to help yourself and your family get ready to sell your home:

1. Take pictures of every room before you begin to remove the "you."

2. Throw a house cooling party, and make sure the guest list includes everyone who might be emotionally attached to the property: your immediate and extended family, your friends, your children's friends.

3. Give anyone who has possessions stored in your home a time frame in which to remove their things. If you have grown children who have left articles of their childhood in your home, give them a reasonable time to say whatever good-byes they need to say, after which they must pack up their boxes of term papers, high school trophies, favorite stuffed animals, and so on. Set a clear deadline for when their possessions must be out of the home. If they can't or won't do this themselves, pack up their childhood mementos and ship the boxes to them.

4. When you are alone in your home, turn off all phones and other electronics. Sit quietly in a room. Remember times that you have had in that room, let the space sink into you visually, noting its smell and its sounds. Don't get up until you feel you are ready to say good-bye to that room. Do the same for each room in your home.

5. Make a list of what you're going to miss most about your property: the eastern sunlight, the holly bushes, the twenty-four-hour...