Step 3 To Selling a Home: Time To Declutter and Stage Your Home

Once you've gotten a start on the initial Seller Homework paperwork and your Listing Agreement is complete, we'll visit your home again and walk through, room-by-room, to create a comprehensive plan for getting your home ready to list. This may include list of furniture that needs to be removed or relocated, items that need to be decluttered, rooms that need a sprucing up, etc., and together we’ll determine whether we need to bring in a professional stager to stage either certain rooms or the entire property. Unless the property is vacant, we usually don’t need a stager. Instead, we may move your own furniture and decorative items around to create a more cohesive space or even bring in artwork and small pieces of furniture from our own collection or even from our own home for free to accompany the furniture you already have in your home.

If your home is vacant and we do need a stager, we can recommend several companies that provide staging option in a variety of price ranges. Here is an article from the National Association of REALTORS® that shows some great before and after photos highlighting why staging a vacant home can be important. (Please note that this is a cost to you, as the seller, but our goal is to keep your expenses as low as possible, so staging may not be the best option)

Instead of the cost of hiring a professional stager, however, depending on your home, we may opt to use virtual staging in just a few keys rooms to highlight the space in our marketing. Virtual staging can be a much more effective way to stage a home for listing photos and marketing pieces, while removing the staging cost from your list of expenses to sell your home. We pride ourselves on only recommending costs to our clients that make sense for your individual needs and that we feel you will recoup in the sale process. The bottom line is this: every home is different, and every seller's needs are different and can depend on a lot of factors, so we will discuss all of this with you in detail and determine together what we think the best course of action is for your home and your situation.

Here is our complete staging/decluttering checklist to help you get your home ready. Remember, we’ll create a personalized list just for your home.  Once the staging/decluttering is done, let us know so we can schedule a time to come back over, take one final look at the property, before we schedule an appointment with our photographer to take professional photos of your home.

Questions? Call us at 404-994-2181 or email Maura(at)BuySellLiveAtlanta(dot)com.