Stagers, make your clients’ lives easier with these house showing survival tips

Summary

Home staging expert, Debra Gould, offers several house showing survival tips for home stagers to pass along to their clients.

Stagers, make your clients’ lives easier with these house showing survival tips

Depending on your clients’ family dynamics, keeping a home perfectly staged for its duration on the market can be quite difficult. While it might be effortless for a working, childless couple to keep their condo immaculate for showings, a young family with working parents and small children is going to find the same thing quite challenging.

If you’re afraid that the home you’ve just finished staging will fall apart the minute you close the door behind you, why not leave your clients with some tips to make it easier to keep their home looking great?

The following list of home showing survival tips will help ease your clients’ stress and will go one step further towards ensuring a home you’ve staged sells as fast as possible:

• No garage sales. Advise against your clients having a garage sale while their home after the real estate sign goes up. All their unwanted items should have been removed prior to home staging, but if there was no time to complete this step, recommend all unwanted items be donated to charity and other seasonable and infrequently used items be put into storage. Nothing says “desperate home seller” like a garage sale sign next to a for sale sign at the end of the drive way. It’s best that buyers don’t know your clients are in a hurry to sell, so you should make that clear and suggest they put off the garage sale until they’re in their new home.

• Prevent clutter build-up. To avoid daily clutter on the table and counter tops, such as newspapers, magazines and other mail, tell your clients to get a basket or box to put all that stuff in. When restricted to one container, it will be easy to stash these items away for last minute showings.

• Remove valuables. If your clients gather up their small personal items and items of monetary or sentimental value to be stored offsite, it will be much easier than searching for and hiding them before each showing.

• Get rid of extra toys. If there are small children in the home, you would have made sure all excess toys were removed prior to staging but there’s more you can do. Recommend that while the house is on the market each child is only allowed one basket of favorite items that can be neatly tucked away for showings. These items should not include Lego or other small pieces that are time-consuming to clean up.

• Let the sunshine in. Ensure the home is shown in its best light by reminding your clients to open up the window coverings and turn on all the lights before every showing. You want the home to be shown in good lighting conditions so it seems bright and cheerful not dark and stuffy.

About the author

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Gould created the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to help home sellers and real estate agents locate staging services in their area.