Staging a Home During the Holiday Season

Staging a Home During the Holiday Season

The housing market hasn’t exactly been easy to deal with recently and the holiday season is typically a lot slower when it comes to finalizing sales. While that doesn’t mean you can’t sell your home during this busy time of year, it does mean you’ll need to work a little harder to appeal to those who are viewing the house. You’ll need to go above and beyond when it comes to staging.

What is Staging?

Home staging is simply defined as the art of preparing a home for the market. There are people who specialize in staging homes, making them more appealing to the masses. Theoretically, the better staged your home is, the faster it will sell. While this is usually your responsibility as the seller, your real estate agent will give you some extra advice. You can also hire a professional to do the work if you so choose.

Holiday Home Staging

Before you can focus on the holiday season, you’ll want to make sure your basic staging tasks are complete. Your home should be completely cleaned and de-cluttered. Anything that needs repair should be taken care of and any walls that need paint should be painted. The people who visit your home, holiday season or not, should be able to picture themselves living there. This means you need to remove as many pictures and personal items as possible. Your den may have served as the perfect sports-bar for your buddies for years, but you should remove all pennants and memorabilia so that those who aren’t sports fans can visualize a use for the room.

Keep your outdoor décor relatively simple. You will want to avoid lawn ornaments, inflatable decorations, and too many lights. Stick to simple, classic white lights and consider a festive holiday wreath for your door. A little bit of lighting can go a long way in showing off your home’s architectural qualities. A lot of gaudy colored lights may deter visitors.

Inside the home, keep things simplistic. A Christmas tree is fine if you can find one that does not take up too much space in a room, as that would make the room feel smaller. You will want to avoid overtly religious decorations, so this is not the year to put out your Nativity scene or Menorah. The idea is to keep your home festive yet neutral so that it appeals to everyone without offending. Snowmen and classic winter decorations that don’t target specific holidays are the way to go.

The general idea is to accentuate your home’s best features without detracting from them. In the case of holiday decorating, less really is more. Ask your real estate agent for advice if you aren’t sure about making adjustment to your décor.