Our Top 6 Home Staging Tips: How to Create an Enticing Experience for Potential Buyers

As you work through the process of selling a home, you’ll quickly learn there’s much more to selling your property than simply listing it. One of the most pivotal parts of the journey to a fruitful sale? Home staging. While it can feel a bit overwhelming at first—the great thing about home staging is you don’t have to spend much money to make a major impact. It’s all about simple, strategic swaps, subtractions, and additions that cost you nothing but a little time and thought.

If you’re wondering how to stage a house for sale in a way that’s enticing and effective, you’re in the proper place. Today, we’re offering up our six most strategic home staging tips to ensure your house shows beautifully and sells successfully.

1. Enhance your exterior entrance.

First impressions are incredibly impactful. We humans are hard-wired to make snap judgments—and then allow those snap judgments to inform the way we regard a person, object, or situation. In fact, a Princeton Study found that humans form opinions on attractiveness, likability, and trustworthiness in less than one second when first meeting someone…and homebuying is no different. Regardless of how stunning the rest of your home may be, if the entrance leaves something to be desired, the rest of the property tour will be tainted by that poor first impression.

• Plants make for wonderful greeters—and they’re an inexpensive way to heighten the experience of approaching and entering your home.

• A manicured lawn (if you have a lawn) is ideal—though, especially here in Southern California, sustainable and drought-tolerant landscaping is always appreciated.

• General cleanliness is key. Sweep your front porch. Pressure-wash your drive and scrub away oil stains (a mixture of baking powder and club soda scrubbed with a bristle brush works like a charm). Wipe away any dirty fingerprints around the doorknob. The list goes on (and on…and on).

2. Declutter and minimize.

When it comes to selling a home, remember: people want to be able to envision themselves in your house. Having too much of your own “stuff” in a space can impede a buyer’s ability to see the potential of the property and envision their life there. Less is always more in the world of home staging. You don’t need to add throw pillows or extra wall art in an attempt to make the space feel “lived in” or homey. In fact, quite the contrary—the fewer items you have on the walls and in the space in general, the larger and more open your home will feel.

A few of our favorite home staging tips for decluttering a space?:

• Store away device chargers.
• Tuck away or tie back visible cords.
• Put your personal items and tschotskes away.
• Keep your countertops as clear as possible.
• Pare down personal photos—a few is completely fine, but less is more.

3. Engage the senses.

When you’re thinking through how to stage a home, you’re likely thinking about things from a visual perspective (as you should be)—but diving deeper and engaging the senses of smell and hearing is a highly effective way to create an enveloping, memorable experience for buyers.

While there are certainly finances and logistics involved, at its core, buying a home is an emotionally-driven process—and what a buyer hears, sees, and smells plays a major role in how they feel. Below are a few of our favorite ways to think outside the visual realm and tap into the senses that leave a lasting impact when you’re selling a home.

• Smell:
  • Freshen up: Mitigate odors and neutralize strong smells (like pet odors). If weather permits, open up the windows.

• Remove trash: This one seems obvious, but it’s something people often forget as they’re preparing for showings.

• Get to baking: Freshly baked goods are such an effective way to fill your home with an inviting scent. If you’re feeling generous, you can leave some out in a pretty display dish or on a cake stand for potential buyers to enjoy.

• Light candles: Candles are such an easy, inexpensive way to add a lovely scent to your home, and—added bonus!—they also create a warm, calming ambiance. Just be careful to select subtle, fresh scents (think: something like linen, eucalyptus, or citrus) as opposed to overly scented, artificial options (birthday cake or candy apple). Strong, unnatural scents could bother your buyers and indicate you’re attempting to cover up a foul odor.

• Spring for fresh flowers: This is one of our all-time favorite home staging tips. Fresh flowers are such a beautiful way to freshen and liven up your interior. 

• Use our favorite trick: One of the best ways to get your house smelling garden-fresh in a flash? Place a few sprigs of fresh rosemary, a lemon rind, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract in a pot of boiling water with no lid and allow to boil for 30 minutes or more before your showing. (Just remember to pull the pot off the stove and clean up before buyers arrive.)

• Sound:
  • Surround sound: While it’s certainly not necessary, having some background music playing as part of your home staging efforts is a really wonderful way to create a welcoming ambiance. We recommend soft jazz or coffee-house vibes—something laid-back and low-key is best.

• Water features: If you have one on your property, be sure to put it to good use as you’re showing your home. Water features can add a charming—and calming—energy to your home. They’re also particularly helpful when it comes to hiding traffic, construction, and street noise (if that’s something that affects your property). 

4. Clean (really clean).

It’s no secret you need to keep your space clean for showings when you’re selling a home—but this doesn’t just mean you can do a quick floor-sweeping and call it a day. It’s important to get in all the nooks, crannies, crevices, and hard-to-reach places. Showing a truly clean home makes all of the difference in the world. Buyers’ eyes will go everywhere—from baseboards to ceiling fans—as they analyze your property during showings; if there’s built-up grime or grease to be found, they’ll find it. Something as seemingly trivial as seeing major dust build-up on fan blades could make or break how potential buyers feel about your home.

5. Bring the outdoors in.

From fresh floral arrangements to fresh coastal air—bringing elements of the outdoors inside creates a lovely, inviting atmosphere for showings.

• Flowers: We’re mentioning flowers twice today for good reason. Fresh flora is the key to taking your home staging game from “so-so” to seriously stunning in a matter of seconds. Pepper vases of fresh flowers throughout your home before showings—foyer tables, kitchen islands, dining tables, and/or bedroom dressers are all great places to add a pop of life via a small, thoughtful arrangement.

• Houseplants: Houseplants are a perfect addition to any interior—and they are particularly great for adding color and life to spaces you feel may be lacking in those arenas (think: that one guest bathroom that gets no natural light and just feels sterile no matter how you decorate or what you do). Fiddle leaf figs and succulents are amongst our favorites for home staging—and ZZ plants, snake plants, and dracaena will all do well in low-light areas.

• Open curtains (and windows!): If you live by the beach or in the mountains, open those windows and let that coastal breeze or crisp alpine air reinvigorate your home. Regardless of where you live, unless you have a view that’s particularly unattractive (i.e. you’re overlooking a parking lot), you should absolutely open your curtains, shutters, or blinds and let the light (and views) saturate your space for showings.

6. Remove signs of pets.

We couldn’t get through our list of home staging tips without touching on this incredibly important point. Removing pet odors is a given—but you also want to lint roll couches and cushions, steam-clean your carpets, wipe away any paw prints, and put away litter boxes, crates, toys, and beds.

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When done thoughtfully, home staging can make the difference between lowball offers and a full-on bidding war. It’s such a low-hassle, high-impact way to increase the appeal of your property and drive up buyer interest.

We would be honored to facilitate the process of selling your home in Southern California as you prepare to embark on the next chapter of your life. Reach out today to schedule a time to chat. 

In the meantime, browse the rest of our Journal for even more tips, resources, and insight.