Home Staging: The Creative Touch to Make Your House Shine

According to The Zebra, staging your home can decrease the time your home is on the market by 73% and the majority of homes (85%) that are staged sell at 5-23% over their listed price. What does all that mean? It means staging your home is a solid choice in many cases! We sat down this week with Paul Sewald, husband of VIBE agent Dan Schneider, who has been staging houses for over eight years. 

Paul comes with a lifetime of experience in home design, antique refurbishment, furniture sales and real estate. His years of experience notwithstanding, Paul is passionate about design and started making curtains and bedding with his grandmother’s Singer sewing machine at a young age. Since then, he’s dabbled in flipping houses and now, staging (among other careers, including working for Delta Airlines). 

Paul’s biggest piece of advice to any homeowner selling their house is to look at their possessions with a neutral eye. Many items in your home are special, have sentimental value or are unique to you and your family, but a buyer wants to walk into a home and imagine it as theirs. That means it’s generally a good idea to remove personal items - awards and degrees from the walls and even pictures of your pets and kids. Remember, you’ll be packing these items to move anyway, so you might as well get a head start!

When Paul sees a home for the first time, he suggests the homeowner declutters and cleans (like really cleans). Even an unstaged, or empty, home should be spotless. Additionally, if you can, paint areas a neutral color. Paul laughingly brought up a Pottery Barn catalog. Any of us could look at those rooms and imagine ourselves in them - make your home the same by creating a neutral and uncluttered look.

Paul has a garage full of furniture and décor items just waiting to make your home shine. He pays attention to trending colors month to month and thrives on the challenge of making every home look its very best. 

In the end, whether you have your home professionally staged or not, there’s plenty you can do yourself to increase the likelihood of your home selling quickly and for a good price. Think neutral, clean, minimal clutter and depersonalized as much as possible - make it easy for your buyers to imagine themselves living there!

Questions about buying or selling a home? We’re here to chat!