Renting staging furniture to decorate a house can help it sell for more. How much more? According to the National Association of Realtors, sellers see a potential $400 return for every $100 invested in staging!
According to the expert realtors on Trulia, the increase isn’t just because buyers think you have great taste (though that can’t hurt). It’s because staging an empty home — or sprucing up a lived-in, fixer-upper — helps buyers imagine themselves living in it.
What Does Home Staging Mean?
Staging is the process of strategically arranging furnishings and decor to make a house look its best while selling. If you’re still living in the home while it’s listed, this can be as simple as temporarily storing older, worn furnishings and replacing them with rented staging furniture for a refreshed look. Or, if your home will be empty, you can rent an entire home’s worth of furnishings and decor to stage the scene.
Staging Furniture Allows You to Present Rooms in Their Best Light
Using staging furniture encourages prospective buyers to imagine different uses for each space, which helps you shine in competitive markets. Because well-placed staging furniture makes such a big difference, homebuyers are becoming accustomed to seeing staged homes—in person, on home decorating shows, and in online listings. Here are our tips on using staging furniture to sell your house faster so you don’t get left behind!
Staging Step 1: Switch Your Mindset
It’s important to remember that your goal is to help potential buyers imagine the possibilities for each space, not just how you used a room. As you evaluate each room, shift your mindset and focus on the buyer. Once you can detach yourself from your home, you can view it as a product and go about preparing the space for maximum appeal.
Staging Step 2: Get Rid of Clutter & Half Your Furniture
The first task when staging a home is removing clutter and cleaning the house. Remove knick-knacks and personal items from all surfaces. And don’t just put them in closets; potential buyers usually look in them, and you want yours to appear roomy. Box up spare belongings and get them out of the house.
Additionally, remove at least half your furniture. This could be difficult since you probably are used to — and use — the furniture in your home. But your house will look bigger and more appealing to most buyers with less furniture in it.
Staging Step 3: Rent Staging Furniture
When selecting staging furniture, don’t focus on comfort or utility. Instead, pick pieces for how well they show off the unique features of each room in your home. Don’t have a design eye? Here’s what we mean:
Avoid sets and rent mismatched pieces of furniture. When the pieces of a matching set are grouped together in a small space, it encourages the eye to stay focused on that smaller area instead of exploring up and around the room. If you do rent a matching set, add visual interest by breaking sets up, placing pieces around your home.
Rent rugs to upgrade your floors. If your carpet needs replacing in high traffic areas, a well-placed rug can detract from the damage. Brightly colored rugs can also be used to draw the eye to architectural details such as a lovely hearth or bay window.
Don’t go overboard with bold color. For important rooms, choose neutral colored furniture that complements the space. Neutral doesn’t mean boring, but it does mean staying away from shocking colors.
Rent multiple pieces of decor in a consistent color to make rooms flow. While neutrals should make up the majority palate for any room, weaving pops of the same color throughout a space creates the feeling that it flows cohesively. You can incorporate similar hues in everything from artwork to pillows and accessories. Generally, stagers recommend dedicating 60% of a room’s space to a single color, 30% to a secondary color, and 10% to an accent.
Staging Step 4: Expertly Arrange Your Rented Staging Furniture
Now that you’ve rented staging furniture, it’s time to arrange it in your home! Here are a few psychological tricks that draw buyers’ eyes to all the right places:
Really think about furniture placement. We scan a room from left to right upon entry. With that in mind, staging experts suggest that you place the tallest piece of furniture in the room in the far left corner. This can make any room appear larger. Also, placing a large or tall piece of furniture on either side of an entryway or door makes a room appear smaller. On the other hand, placing such pieces farther back in a room makes the same space appear larger. Good to know!
Use the ‘rule of three.’ Interior designers swear by this golden rule of home staging, which involves grouping items—from chairs to lighting to artwork and accessories — in threes (or fives or sevens or nines). According to the experts, arranging items in odd numbers forces the eye to move around a space and makes the overall experience more natural and visually rich (compared with the forced feeling you might get from even numbers).
Highlight focal points of your home. Walk into any well-staged home, and you’ll notice great accent accessories positioned near a room’s best attributes. For example, a grouping of (three!) vases near a gorgeous fireplace or a large plant near a window with a view. Stagers also frequently position furniture at an angle to facilitate better movement in a square or skinny room, or to highlight existing focal points.
Create cozy conversation spaces. Prospective buyers who are really interested want to feel what it’s like to socialize in a home’s common areas without moving chairs. In small rooms, placing furniture in conversational groups (think a love seat and two chairs) makes rooms feel larger.
Is your home lucky enough to have a too-long room? Consider creating two separate chat areas and delineating them with area rugs to create the illusion of more space. (Pro tip: Using just one rug that’s too large actually makes a room look smaller.) The back of a couch can also be a great divider between rooms in an open floor plan.
Need to Rent Staging Furniture? FWR Rental Haus Provides Fast & Safe Staging Furniture Delivery!
Just get in touch with our Las Vegas, Nevada showroom at (702) 982-8102 for information on available stock today.
