These Home Staging Mistakes Are Impossible For Buyers To Forget

Home staging is a huge part of putting your home on the market. For one thing, it helps your photos stand out and get potential buyers in the door. For another, once they’re there, it helps them visualize themselves living in the space and, hopefully, encourages them to write an offer. With that in mind, it’s incredibly important to get staging right and, yet, it’s also easy to make home staging mistakes.

To that end, we decided to help you get it right by pointing out some of the most common mistakes. Read them over to make sure that none of them are happening in your home.

When staging, it’s important to keep your home relatively depersonalized. Image: The Woodlands Home Staging

Keeping it too personal

When you intend to live in your current home for a while, it makes sense to make it feel personal. After all, your home is supposed to be your oasis from the outside world. Naturally, you would want to fit it to your personal tastes. However, when you’re selling your home, that goal changes. Now, you want your home to appeal to as many potential buyers as possible.

The fix: Go for a neutral look, both in terms of decor and the number of personal items you have around the house. Take down those family photographs and replace them with some affordable geometric artwork. Repaint over in-your-face colors with soothing, neutral shades.

However, even neutral palettes need some contrast. Image: KCS, Inc.

Not including some contrast

That said, sometimes when people depersonalize their homes for resale, they can go a little too far. Seeing multiple rooms decked out in tan or light gray might not turn buyers off, but it won’t make your home very memorable for them, either. Your best bet is to include a little contrast in your neutral palette for visual interest.

The fix: Remember the 10-30-60 rule. If both your primary and secondary shades – those that take up 60 percent and 30 percent of the room, respectively – are relatively neutral, you can splurge on your accent shade to make it eye-catching. We recommend using a bold color in things like accent pillows or wall art in order to help the rest of the room pop.

Pay attention to scale and proportion. Image: Robert Thomas Homes

Forgetting about scale

Scale and proportion are important to consider when putting together any room. However, they become even more critical when you’re trying to sell. Put simply, potential buyers look to your furniture as a guide for how they envision themselves living in the space.

If the furniture is too big, they’ll assume that the house doesn’t have enough space. If, on the other hand, your furniture is too small for the room, they’ll assume that they will also have trouble making the space feel appropriately full.

The fix: Keep your proportions in check. As a rule, you’re looking for your furniture to be in 2/3 proportion to the room. By that, we mean the length of your sofa should take up 2/3  the width of the nearest wall. The coffee table should then be 2/3 the width of the couch. The same proportions can also be used for dining tables or bedframes.

Don’t forget to cater to your target market. Image: Little Staging

Not considering your target audience

When you’re staging your home, you should always have your target audience in mind and stage accordingly. In real estate, your target audience is whoever is most likely to buy your home or the demographic that makes up most of your neighborhood.

If, for instance, your neighborhood is made up of young professionals and their families, you may want to aim for a more modern color palette and decor. If, however, your neighborhood is full of empty-nesters who are downsizing, it might make more sense to go for a more contemporary look.

The fix: Take the time to look around your neighborhood and see who, predominantly, has moved in recently. Then, bring what you have discovered to your stager. He or she will know what should be done to appeal to your target audience. If you’re serving as your own stager, don’t hesitate to do some research online about the best way to appeal to them.

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