PerkStreet Financial

The following guest post was written by Mike from Green Panda Treehouse. Mike says: “ I work in the financial industry, specializing in personal finance. I enjoy trying to earn cash in different ways other than waiting for my paycheck every two weeks. I love to try different things and I will post true stories about them. I am currently building my own online business while working 4 days a week at my day job.”

About a month ago, we decided to put up our house for sale. While we really enjoyed our house, we wanted to have more land so our kids could run all over the place. I mentioned on my blog that I didn’t use a realtor to sell my house. I find that they are costly and don’t provide much support during the transaction.

I actually sold my house in 2 weeks! I got the price I wanted and we are now ready to move in. How could this be possible? While I wanted to save as much money as possible on the realtor, I still decided to add some “love” to my property before putting up the “for sale” sign. This is what we call home staging: adding some love to your house so the buyer will fall in love with it.

Home staging doesn’t have to be expensive and it doesn’t have to be complicated either. Here are a few tips to help you achieve an effective and inexpensive home staging:

1. Make sure your staging budget doesn’t exceed 2% of the house value (we actually used 1% in our case). We were asking $344,000 for our house and we closed at $330,000. Following this rule, I should have put between $6,000 and $7,000 to arrange my property. In fact, we managed to spend about $1,500! We spent about $500 on paint, another $500 on decorative objects, and the final $500 on small repairs to windows, screens, and shelves.

2. Remove personal items such as pictures, toys, or heirlooms. We removed several family pictures to bring it down to a minimum. The house still looked homey but you don’t have the impression that you are visiting a stranger’s house.

3. Add fresh paint where it is required. Neutral, clean colors are best. We replaced any flashy or dark color we had in the house with calmer tones.

4. Take away everything that is unnecessary in each room in order to make each look bigger. We asked my parents to store extra furniture while we sold our house, and swapped our sofa with a friend who had a nicer one. While this option is free, you can also rent furniture rather inexpensively if you think it will help you sell your house fast.

5. Buy a few colorful or trendy objects to update the feel of your house. The color will also punch up pale, neutral walls without being too personal.

Below are some before and after photos of what we did. A huge difference with just a little effort and money!