When it comes to staging a property for sale, you have a lot to consider and some times you have limitations on what you can do. Completely changing the furniture of a home is hard to achieve if the owner is still using the home as their primary residence and with sellers wanting a quick sale, you don’t want to do anything which will take too long to put in place.

So with the time pressure and limitations around staging residential properties for sale, what are some easy ways to improve the aesthetics of a home that are easy to put in place for viewings and not obstructive to the occupant’s day-to-day life?

Luckily enough, that’s the question we’ll be answering today!

Work With Smell

It’s a well known old-school staging tip, to bake cookies before having viewings of a house to make the property smell like fresh baked cookies. But in the life of a modern estate agent, often there’s simply not enough time in the day to arrive early in order to bake cookies and this may be too much to ask of your seller if they have a busy life.

Still the principle still applies the same, a nice homely scent like freshly baked cookies can have some influence over prospective buyers. But rather than baking a batch of cookies from scratch, there are other things to do to gain the same effect, like heating up some vanilla extract in an oven or dripping some vanilla extract on cotton buds creating impromptu diffusers, both will achieve that ‘fresh cookie smell’ buyers love!

Add In Colour

When you’re staging a property, colour is incredibly important, it can be used as a guide to help direct the eyes of potential buyers to highlight points during a home tour as strong colours catch the eye easily.

When you’re restricted on what changes you can make to a property, there are always plenty of easy ways to add in colour, whether it be adding a colourful rug or throw in a room, hanging up some colourful art in each room to give a more complete look to a home, or simply swapping the fabric on their blinds with colourful replacement slats to add in more vibrant colours.

Bring In Lighting

Lighting is incredibly important in both staging and photographing a home in preparation for taking it to market. Not every home will have perfect lighting and with British weather being like it is, you won’t always get good ‘golden hour’ natural lighting, so it’s a lot easier for everyone involved to take the lighting into your own hands.

For photographing a property, some simple box lights can make all the difference when it comes to photo quality, then for staging a property for viewings you can bring in lighting in the form of lamps, fairy lights and LED strip lights. Simply setting up some extra lighting in rooms can make rooms look a lot bigger and warmer, it’s a simple thought, but one that is most effective!