3 Benefits of Staging Your Home

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Are you planning on selling your home? One of the best steps a seller can take is to stage their home before they place it on the market. Home staging is worth the time and financial investment for a variety of reasons. Keep reading and discover a few benefits of why you should stage your home.

More appealing in pictures

Homebuyers are reliant on the internet to aid them in their home search. In fact, this is where the vast majority of buyers begin their search. Homes for sale can be easily accessed via search engines. The typical homebuyer will search and compare several homes before scheduling any appointments. If your goal is to make your home stand out from others on the market, home staging should make your home appear more attractive in pictures. As a result, your home will stand out from others on the market, and people want to see your home in-person.

Buyers can see the homes potential

Some people struggle to see themselves living in an empty home. The right home staging can create a warm, homey feeling that buyers are searching for. If you can connect with buyers on an emotional level, you are more likely to receive offers on your home. The right combination of furniture, colors, artwork, etc., will fill up a room and showcase its potential.

Can make the home appear larger

Did you know that home staging can make rooms look bigger? There is a misconception that an empty room appears bigger if it is empty. You want potential buyers to think that they are getting their money’s worth if they were to buy your home. Rooms that appear small are going to be less favorable to the majority of homebuyers.

HUD Foreclosures

HUD foreclosures and VA Foreclosures are some of the best homes to buy when price is part of the equation. As with most Americans, price is always a concern. If not buying the same house for less, why not buy more house for the same dollar invested? When looking for a good deal it is hard to do better than the VA or HUD foreclosures market. The simple truth is that there are just more VA and HUD homes on the market, as they represent such a large number of mortgages that are generated each year. This translates into more foreclosures just by the magnitude of difference between all others comparing to the two largest.

The two largest also being government owned and operated means that they have less time to wait to make money back on the home. The FHA is especially known for selling HUD homes for less than the average sales price in a given area. FHA foreclosures represent a fraction of HUD but they are still a significant number of homes and both should be considered.

VA (Veterans Administration) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have different and unique opportunities for the buyer. Both are often forgiven for the local taxes normally associated with the purchase of a home (this is on a county by county basis). Be sure to ask the local title company or escrow company to look into it for you before closing as this is often missed due to their are not used to dealing with the 2 to 3 percent of the market that VA and HUD foreclosures represent.

Foreclosure Listings Increasing

As the market settled after the mortgage meltdown foreclosure listings also settled and fewer homes were on the market with a placard reading “Bank Foreclosure” in big red lettering. This was a good thing for the entire real estate market. Having an abundance of foreclosures brings the entire market down and it makes it harder for home owners, who would like to move, to get the appropriate price for their home as a similar home down the same street was sold for substantially less and the appraiser is using the foreclosure as a comparable sale.

This is just one of the problems when there are too many foreclosure listings in any area. Another issue is the television set that sits in everyone’s living room harping about the price of homes based on the number of foreclosures and this constant barrage of negative information makes most people sit on the sidelines waiting for the market to either implode completely or to correct itself. Meanwhile while they wait, others are buying foreclosure listings and making great investments.

Whatever the reason, a market can only handle so many foreclosure listings at any given time. The more foreclosures, the lower the market gets and this is a lesson the banks that were foreclosing and selling off realized too late. The market and their investments would have been better off if there had not been a rush to divest themselves of the toxic assets made more toxic by their own actions.