How to Use Design Psychology to Stage Your Home for a Top-Dollar Sale

A new business venture to help home sellers, home staging, assists property owners in preparing their home for the best possible sale. Home stagers visit your home and either tell you how to redesign it or actually do the work for you. These services do great work, but they don't always understand interior design. They know what sells houses, but many home stagers could benefit from a little interior design and marketing psychology training to assure the homeowner of a top-dollar sale.

How does design psychology help stage your home for a top-dollar sale? Design psychology helps you with emotions: yours and your prospective buyers. You must learn to love your house at the same time you learn to let go of your home. When you remember why you bought your home in the first place and clean it up with love, your care radiates throughout. Your buyers pick up on the undercurrents in your home; they want to buy happiness and a new lifestyle. You need to let go of your home so that you can be objective about staging your house. Thinking of your house as an investment or product for sale clears your emotions to pack up your personal treasures, which showcase your personality. This means that you create a new setting for your buyers, one that allows them the freedom to visualize their own personal treasures in your rooms.

Design psychology also helps you make easy choices in your home makeover. Understanding the target buyers' emotions means that you know what to leave in your home and what you need to take out for staging. Beyond the usual de-cluttering and super cleaning, you stage your home with suggested activities that speak to your buyers' feelings. Home buyers desire to feel happy, relaxed, and smart about their home choice. Therefore, make over your home with design details, such as colors, lighting, patterns, and textures which support the buyers' feelings. Happy colors depend on the selling season; use warm colors in cool climates and cool colors in warm seasons. Balance with relaxed colors like grays and sky blues. Stage "smart" activities like reading and playing chess.

Also, you will know, without a lot of agonizing, which colors to paint the exterior. For instance, perhaps you only need to repaint the front door to attract your specific type of buyer. If your property costs less than the average home in your market, you're targeting first-time home buyers. These buyers--typically young and unsophisticated--prefer basic, uncomplicated colors. If you're selling during warm weather, you want to offer a cooling oasis. Maybe, like 80% of houses, your home is basic tan or cream. In this case, you would choose blue or green to freshen your front door.

Design psychology methods help you makeover your home with the buyer's profile in mind. House buyers pick the home they can't live without, even if it costs more than the house next door. Stage your home to attract your target buyers' emotions and sell your home, fast, for top dollar.

Jeanette Fisher, author of "Sell Your Home for Top Dollar--FAST!" "Home Staging for Top-Dollar Sales," and other books, teaches professional real estate investing seminars and Design Psychology college courses. For more articles on selling: http://www.sellfast.info Read about Home Staging: http://www.homestaging.us

MORE RESOURCES:

RELATED ARTICLES

Buying A Home - What Is That Noise!?!
You've found the perfect home, closed escrow and just finished moving in. As you happily fall asleep, all seems well in the world.

Planning for Real Estate with Estate Planning
One of the most important considerations you will need to make in regards to your real estate holdings and your estate includes tax planning. If not handled properly, your estate could end up getting hit with significant losses due to taxes after your demise.

Buying A Holiday Home in Rural Ireland
Ireland has recently witnessed an upsurge in the number of investors buying holiday homes in some of the country's most scenic areas. With stars like Jeremy Irons and Daniel Day-Lewis popping up in the quaint villages of West Cork, prices in many of these areas are at a premium.

Real Estate Investing Skill Acquisition
Real estate investing is not in any list of high school electives. You can't get an accredited degree in real estate investing.

Writing on the Wall - Are REITs a Better Investment for You?
When I was a young child I had many annoying tendencies. My mother explained to me that the most annoying was my need to write on the walls of every room.

Grab Your Dream UK Home On The Cheap - Property Auctions
Did you know that every year thousands of UK properties are sold at significantly below market value? The majority of these properties are released through property auctions where regular savings of between 10% to 40% are available to market value. Even so, property auctions continue to be used only by the elite and for the astute buyer/investor this generates a fantastic opportunity to secure a dream home/good investment at bargain basement prices.

Make Money With Room Rentals
I don't know why I didn't do it sooner, but one day many years ago, I decided to try renting rooms in my home. I was young and single, and had a nice mobile home on small piece of property.

Escalation Clauses - A Home Buyers Secret Weapon
Today we discuss escalation clauses because much of the country is experiencing an extreme "sellers' market." By that, I mean there are more buyers than there are sellers, and that results in sellers' getting more than one offer to buy their property.

Find Out If There Are Sexual Predators Nearby Before You Buy A Home or Property!
When looking for a new home or property, buyers ask many questions. Typical questions might be about the history of the property, property tax amounts, the school system, proximity to medical facilities, shopping malls, etc.

Think You Can't Afford Your Own Home, Think Again!
Do you have bad credit, no credit, filed a bankruptcy, have a ton of late pays, medical bills, or been through a divorce? Well, we have the perfect solution for you - Lease Purchasing your own home!What is Lease Purchasing?A Lease Purchase is a process that combines a basic rental lease with an agreement to purchase, or with an option to purchase the property. The Buyer (or Lease-Purchaser) pays to the seller a monthly payment that usually approximates a rental amount or a typical mortgage payment on the home.

Maintaining Small Town Charm In An Ever-Changing World
Virtually any state in the country has the appeal of multiple small towns. Ask almost anyone who lives in small town why they are here and they'll tell you they enjoy the small town feeling while being close to all the conveniences of a larger city.

The Costs of Transforming Your Home into a Buyers Dream House
Turning your house into the home of a buyer's dreams doesn't have to cost a great deal of money. In fact, armed with some paint and the determination to work hard, most home sellers usually need to invest only about $500 to spruce up their homes for a quick sale.

The Real Estate Bubble Fallacy
There has been a lot of talk lately about the "Real Estate Bubble", and a lot of folks are asking the question: "When it is going to burst"?They are saying that the market just can't sustain this level of growth and appreciation much longer, and I heat them say that it is inevitable that it must come crashing down soon. People are worried.

Donald Trump on Real Estate
I love what Trump says about the business of real estate.I am a big believer in setting up business systems for all my clients.

Why Average Sale Price Statistics are Misleading
One of the most common statistics used when gauging the strength of an area's real estate market is the average sale price of its homes, but looking into that figure more deeply reveals just how misleading it can be.When listing a home for sale, most realtors establish a price for the home based on market comps of the area - taking into account what other houses sold for and how the home they are listing compares to those.

FSBO: For Sale By Owners Chapter One
She reached the phone on its second ring. "This is Tami!" She confidently answered.

Real Estate Investing - House Problems
Houses can have lots of problemsReal estate investing requires expertise in recognizing these problems and the costs for repair.Sometimes you stumble onto a jewel investment by discovering a house where mom was an excellent housekeeper, and all that's necessary is minor cleanup of the premises to prepare for selling.

Types of Listings with Agents
There are several different types of listing contracts. Few of them are detailed below:Open ListingThis type of listing is when you, the seller, don't want to commit to any one particular agent and when you are also open to selling the home by yourself.

Realty Agents: Don't Ask Don't Tell?
Real estate stories radiate from the water cooler and cocktail parties like a brush fire out of control. Like early stages of fires, real estate transactions start out manageable, but occasionally real estate consumers fan the flames because of inexperience, and some real estate agents misplace the water buckets.

5 Things to Look for in a Property Appraiser
Homeowners who are seeking a property appraiser often ask "How should I choose which real estate appraiser to use?" When selecting a property appraiser, keep the following in mind:Always make sure a property appraiser is licensed or certified by the state to perform real estate appraisals. While state licensing and/or certification isn't always an indication of quality, it ensures that an individual is has met certain standards and been authorized to perform property appraisals.