As soon as that ‘For Sale’ sign breaks ground in your front yard, ready yourself: this is the moment that the world sees your home.

With this single action, a wide audience of buyers can now step inside your well-loved personal space, and envision it as theirs.

If getting multiple offers and fetching a healthy selling price is on your seller’s checklist, you should probably consider home staging. While the jury is still out on whether staging adds value, or if it is worth the time and cost to do it, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support the idea that home staging can support higher selling prices, and lessen the amount of time your home spends on the market.

What is home staging? 

Home staging means curating your home to be more attractive to a wider audience of potential buyers. When done effectively, it can help encourage multiple offers, and aid in driving up your selling price. 

Home staging often involves basic visual spruce-ups like:

• Cleaning
• Rearranging furniture
• Removing clutter 
• Creating space, and
• Updating paint, furnishings, and finishings.

You can do home staging yourself, or you can tap one of Canada’s many professional home stagers to make your property stand out on a listings page.

Home staging: 5 simple steps

Our in-house staging professionals and customers have certainly seen the benefits with their own eyes: with staging help, Properly’s listings sell 70% faster than average.

To help you reap the benefits, too, we asked our experts to share a few of their top tips for adding value to your home via staging.* 

#1. Create a functional, photo-friendly space 

With thoughtful staging, buyers can more easily see the features, details, and potential of a space–and see themselves living in it, too. 

Good home staging can also help you create eye-catching marketing photos to leverage on your listings page. These visuals help highlight the functionality of your home's most attractive areas (kitchens, family rooms, dining areas, and more).

With many buyers turning to the internet to search for homes, posting photos that highlight the beauty of your newly-staged space can generate increased interest, listing views, showings, and offers.

#2. Make material upgrades 

While investing in material upgrades is by far the most expensive strategy on this list, if your home finishings are outdated or a little lacklustre, freshening them up can mean the difference between a so-so showing and a knock-out one.

With buyers in mind, use a critical eye to examine the state of your flooring, tiles, faucets, and light fixtures. Then, determine if investing in these small cosmetic upgrades will help to make the look, feel, and ‘vibe’ of your home more attractive to house hunters.

Sometimes even the smallest fixes can make a strong visual impact on those touring your home. This advice also applies to curb appeal: don’t forget to give your outdoor living space a little TLC as well. 

#3. Power up with paint

A fresh coat of paint on walls or cabinets can be a quick way to cover years of wear and tear, and at a relatively inexpensive cost (if you go the DIY route). It will instantly make your home more appealing, and potentially give your home a value-boost, too.

Think about adding a pop of colour to communal areas to help your home stand out from the rest of the listings. Also consider opting for bright, neutral colours in smaller rooms—this can create the illusion of more space.

*Bonus tip: Adding mirrors in strategic places will reflect colours and bounce light around the home; this means you don’t have to commit to painting too many surfaces in order to get a vibrant, stand-out effect.*

#4. Create a clean slate by decluttering

Removing the ‘stuff’ that takes up space in your home, including clutter and personal items, is one of the easiest ways to spruce up the interior and exterior of your home. The best part is, it’s free! 

When a prospective buyer walks through the door, you want them to immediately have a personal connection to the living space. Removing trinkets and tidying up messy areas gives buyers the physical and mental space to envision it as theirs—and get excited by the potential it has to offer.

#5. Call in the pros 

Staging can be a daunting task for some of us, but there are plenty of professional home stagers available to help—Properly included. This extra support can go a long way in helping you to successfully sell your home, and also make the whole transaction much easier on you. Properly customer Maria has seen this transformation in action: after the Properly team helped to prep and stage her home for sale, she was deeply moved by the difference:

"[The team] decorated it so beautifully that when we went in and saw our new home, we loved it and wanted to buy it again!"

In addition to staging, what else influences home values in Canada? 

While the above tips can help to improve your home’s value and chances of selling, there are a few other factors to keep in mind that you can’t necessarily control: 

• Seasonality: Canada’s real estate market roughly aligns with the four seasons, within which there are fluctuations in buyer interest and seller supply (which causes changes in home prices). A tip: fall and spring are typically the busier selling times.
• Market changes: Interest rates changes and inflation invariably have an impact on the real estate market, what you can afford to buy, and when you should sell. For sellers, these changes may impact the projected value of your home. For buyers, they may impact the type of mortgage you should opt for. 
• Supply and demand: When there isn’t enough housing inventory to go around, prices are driven up and bidding wars may rise, too. The proposed Federal Budget has included measures to tackle housing shortages by accelerating the construction of new housing, as the Canadian market has tended to be short on supply over the last few years.

Why home staging is important

We know that when more potential buyers see a listing, it’s more likely to sell faster and for a higher value. That’s why our team provides staging, marketing, and cleaning services to help you sell your home for more. These are all factors you can control, regardless of larger market trends.

When the time comes for you to sell, staging can help your home stand out among the rest of the listings, encourage more offers, lessen the time spent on the market, and potentially earn you a higher selling price.

All of the above tips can give your home an inviting first impression when potential buyers are perusing your photos on a real estate listing, and when they step through your door during open houses, or private showings.

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*DISCLAIMER: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not an exhaustive review of this topic. The content is not financial or investment advice. No professional relationship of any kind is formed between you and Properly, Properly Brokerage, or Properly Homes. While we have obtained or compiled this information from sources we believe to be reliable, we cannot and do not guarantee its accuracy. We recommend that you consult a trusted professional before taking any action related to this information. Properly is a tech-enabled real estate brokerage that is transforming the home buying and selling experience with AI-powered home valuations and a modern streamlined service. We recommend that you compare and contrast your options, read the fine print, and conduct detailed research into any real estate, loan, and/or investment provider before using their services.*