8 DFW Home Staging Mistakes You Don't Want To Make

 Selling your DFW Home is serious business.  You need to do everything right to get your home to sell quickly at the highest possible price.  The price you list the home at is most important but the second most important thing is staging the home properly to show to prospective buyers.  Make sure you don't make any of these mistakes.

1. Collection Overload. When selling DFW real estate it's very hard for almost any collection to look orderly and neutral, unless they are in an attractive, built-in cases for your collections. Unless your prospective buyers share your affinity for these things, even the dolls your grandma gave you can look like a pile of clutter. These collections distract from the strengths and features of your home. Pack up your collections and put them in storage before you start showing your home.  Of course if we are talking about DFW foreclosures it is very unlikely that the banks will adhere to this advice. 

Get input from a professional stagers of Plano homes and get books on how to stage. View model homes or professionally staged homes that are on the market. Get input from Realtors. If you have a small budget, consider hiring a pro stager for just an hour’s consultation. 

2.  Editing Failure:  You may have a beautiful rug and highest-end personal effects but chances are good that their first impression to buyers viewing your home will still fall short of what they are looking for. The failure to edit our home can manifest in all sorts of staging challenges. When you think you’ve edited as much as you can edit, take another look. Your goal is to remove everything that would allow a prospective buyer to picture you or your family taking place in the home. You want to create as much visual white space in your home as possible.  Also, staging your home to create a cute scenario with no relationship to the selling points buyers care about is of no value and can create a low budget feel.

3.  Going For The Lived In Look? When your home is being shown it must be immaculate, every single time it’s being shown. It should look like no one lives there; no toothbrushes, curling irons or paperwork allowed. No empty bowls of cereal on the counter, actually, nothing on the top of a counter or a table that is not intended to be a design element.

Is this difficult to keep up?  Absolutely, especially if you have children and/or animals living in the home while it’s being shown. But you would be surprised at how bad an impression just a few personal toiletries or dishes can make, distracting prospective buyers and making them wonder why you didn’t care enough to pick up before you let them in. Work with your Realtor to set up ideal showing times, and to come up with a reasonable advance notice requirement they can communicate to buyers agents. And work with your family to set up a system for putting everything away and wiping down all kitchens, bathrooms and other daily mess hot spots every single time your home is going to be shown.

4. Paraphernalia.  Similar to collections, any type of paraphernalia that is allowed to take over a space has the potential to create an instant turnoff for buyers-to-be viewing your home. This includes children’s toys and sporting goods, pet supplies like litter boxes, cages and food, cooking and crafting supplies, work-at-home electronics, supplies, cords and paper clutter. If you’re going to live in your home while it’s on the market, create a system for putting all your paraphernalia and supplies entirely out of view every single time your home is going to be shown.

5.  Closet Stuffing.  If you have years and years worth of personal belongings of several family members that need to be out of sight, but not discarded, it can be very tempting to cram everything in a closet, shove the door shut and call it good. Today's home buyers are desperate for storage space, so will undoubtedly open those same, crammed tight doors in an effort to evaluate how your home ranks for storage. Nicely organized closets with ample room create an impression in the buyer’s mind that they, to, can experience an orderly life in your home, a life where there is a place for everything. And even huge closets, if crammed to the gills, make buyers wonder how they’ll ever get by with so little closet space. 

Use the exercise of staging as an opportunity to sell, donate or throw out things you no longer need - then consider moving as much as possible of what remains to storage for a couple of months, if your closets are too full.  

6.  Failing to Stage For Senses.  A home that smells like pet urine or smoke or has a noisily defective HVAC system is a tough house to sell, no matter how beautifully it is staged. Smells and sounds are very easy to get acclimated to when you live with them. Buyers, however, will detect these same smells the second they walk in your door and the moment they do is the moment they will decide they are not interested in looking farther. Ask your realtor to check you on how your home smells and sounds. Don’t get offended if they have bad news just work with them to fix it.

7.  Not to Stage. The worst of all staging decisions is the surprisingly frequent decision not to bother staging your home at all. Not staging at all, not even bothering to do DIY staging happens every day, and it costs more than the costs of putting some time and effort into getting your home ready for the market. If you’re on a budget, talk with your agent, get some books and, again, consider hiring a stager just for a brief advisory session. It will surely pay off for you.