Home Staging- How to Home Stage; The Basic Tips and Tricks

Home Staging is a relatively new niche profession. Some entrepreneurs have actually created a mega home staging businesses well into the six figure brackets, while many Real Estate Agents do a smaller and less grand version of home staging to supplement their incomes. Either way, we all expect a better presentation when home shopping than we did 15 years ago. Here are the basic tricks and tips to staging a home.

If you want buyers to remember your house, not because it's the one with the roomful of stuffed animals or the shag carpet straight out of 1977, your best bet is to neutralize your decor so that it appeals to a wider range of people. The goal is making your home sell by making it stand out to the buyers as the best house in their price range.

Neutralizing the entire home is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to make the home more appealing.

The Exterior: The outside of a home can push buyers away, convincing them that there is no reason to even bother looking inside. An unusual paint color can be like a huge "Do Not Enter" sign. Before choosing a color, remember that the palette needs to coordinate with the fixed elements of the house, those elements cannot be changed easily, like the roof, the brick and the stone. Even if gray is your favorite neutral, forget about using it if the driveway and front walk have brown tones, or your house includes brick with light and medium browns, and the roof is darker brown. The cool gray fights with all the warm tones of the fixed elements of the house. A warm beige and slightly darker trim is better choice, particularly if you add the punch of warm red on the front door.

If you have decided that the exterior needs to be painted, look for exterior colors that re in a "historic" or "preservation" palette. These colors are usually safe neutral colors, and some brands even provide suggestions for coordinating the trim and door colors.

In the dark: Avoid dark colors whenever possible. They make the rooms look smaller and give an overall negative and sad, or cave-like feeling.

It is okay to add a punchy color like red, or electric blue only in small minor areas. The look being the whole room is neutral and there is a little bit of bright color to liven things up. Take a look at the bathroom picture above. That red towel would not have the same affect if the room were full of color, it would only be adding to the mess.

No matter what your personal preferences are, the rule when staging on a budget is eliminate fussy decorations and clutter.

• If there are curtains remove them, letting the light enter the room and giving the illusion of more space.
• Have just a few pieces of furniture in the room.
• Take out the wall to wall carpet.
• Painting interiors with a hint of yellow will give the room warmth.