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Selling your home can be a trying time. Why wouldn't you want to decrease the time your home spends on the market while increasing your sales price? Relying on a home stager can make all the difference.

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Home Staging Tip of the Day: Cleaning Your Tub

To clean those irritating stains in the bathtub, make a paste by using hydrogen peroxide and cream of tartar. Use an old toothbrush to rub the mixture into the stain and rinse thoroughly.

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Home Staging Tip of the Day: Storage Counts

Everything in its place is a good motto to remember. Always find appropriate places to store your items. Litter boxes in the kitchen and trashcans in the pantry are just two examples of inappropriate placement.

To learn more storage tips when staging your home, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Make It Legal!

Be sure to check with your city or county building inspector before beginning a new project. Many departments require permits, even for things as simple as changing a dishwasher.

To find out more about fix-it-up projects needed for home staging, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: No Open House Before Staging

You should not have one person look at your house until it has been staged completely. It should not go through the broker walkthrough, MLS, open houses, or anything. Stage first!

To find out HOW to stage your home before you sell, read 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Easy Way To Clean Your Microwave

To clean the microwave, fill a paper cup with water and a few tablespoons of baking soda. Nuke it for about 30 seconds, or until you see the contents explode. Then just take a paper towel and wipe it all off. The explosion spreads the cleanser over the entire area, and you can even use the moistened rag or paper towel to wipe outside the microwave and its surrounding area.

To learn more cleaning tips to help you stage your home, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Clean Your Refrigerator

Your refrigerator will need to be cleaned, even if you are not leaving it. People will still look inside and a dirty refrigerator will turn them off. If you are taking it with you, you may as well clean it now. If you are leaving it, then it is imperative to have it sparkling.

You can learn more cleaning tips for your home staging journey by reading 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Stage First

Be sure that your home is staged before you or your realtor takes the photos for the web. Over 70% of all new apartment/home searches are started on the Internet. It is imperative that the property looks good in the photos so that it can attract as many people as possible to see the real thing.

To learn more about how to stage your home before a realtor takes photos, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging: Read 50 Tips at Once!

If you've been reading the series of Home Staging Tips of the Day and Home Staging Advice from professionals, you'll want to read the entire article on ArticleGeek.com. Once you do, you'll surely be inspired to buy the book 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home Now and For More Money Than You Thought. It is easy to read, has step by step instructions, well over 400 tips once you add in the tips from the professionals, case studies, and much more. Get your copy today!

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Window Treatments Matter

New window treatments can make a world of difference. They can add value and style to your home and be something the buyers view as a bonus – something they will not have to buy or replace when they move in. The caution, however, is that you keep the treatments neutral (keep your personality out of the room) and that you make sure they do not block the amount of light that comes into a room.

To learn more about window treatments and many other home staging tips, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Make The Bonus Room a Bonus!

A spare room should be viewed as a bonus. It is a “plus” feature of your home, but only if the buyers can view it as such.

For example, if your spare room is used mostly as an office, then, during the selling process, you need to make it just that – an office! Get rid of the spare bed and the extra dressers full of last season’s clothes. Get rid of the boxes of storage items in the closet. Keep the essentials of your office such as a desk, filing cabinet, bookshelf, and a nice chair in the corner with a small table and lamp.

To learn more about creating bonus space and many, many more tips, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought by Teri B. Clark.

Home Staging Is More Valuable Than Ever

According to the National Association of Realtors (Feb 15, 2007):

The sales of existing homes fell in 40 states in the fourth quarter of last year and home prices dropped in 49 percent of the metropolitan areas surveyed, the widest price decline in the history of the Realtors' survey.

Many economists are worried that the housing bust, which followed a five-year boom, could be a prolonged one as sellers struggle to reduce record levels of unsold homes.

So, what can you do to make your home stand out among the record levels of unsold homes? Stage your home, of course!

Statistics at StagedHomes.com show that you can make at least 3 percent more with home staging. In some areas, that number can go as high as 50 percent! These statistics also show that homes that had not sold in an average of four and a half months after listing sold within a week of being staged by a professional. Homes staged before listing were under contract more than twice as fast as comparable homes that had not been professionally staged.

To learn more about home staging, buy and read 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Add Pampering Accessories

Add pampering accessories! Things like bath bubbles, fluffy towels, and candles not only add the pampering feeling you are trying to achieve, they offer visual comfort with color and texture as well. Psychologically, we all crave that long soak with a good book, and even if we are only in the bathroom for 10 minutes to whip on some make up, just seeing those items displayed promises wonderful baths to come!

To learn more about accessorizing and many other tips, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Add a "POP" of Color

One of the easiest ways to create color is to add beautiful accent pillows to any room. Introducing a complementary accent color in a room can make a room "pop" and come alive. Accent pillows not only add color but texture and warmth as well. By adding throw pillows in a coordinating or contrast fabric to a couch chair, bench, or bed, you can transform your room and add instant warmth inexpensively!

To learn more about adding color, as well as hundreds of other tips, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: Get Rid of Clutter

Take a look around you. Do you have items in your home that are unused and have no real sentimental value? If so, get rid of them! These types of items can often be found in closets, cupboards, basements, and garages. Sometimes they are on bookshelves or even in your everyday living space. The more you are able to move out the more the next buyer will want to "move in."

To find out more about getting rid of clutter, as well as hundreds of more home staging tips, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do NOW to Sell Your Home For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: As Simple as Changing a Handle

If you have dark cabinets, a light colored handle or something in shiny gold will enhance them. If you have light cabinets, you can give them the sleek look by using handles of the same color so that they are hardly noticeable or by using brushed silver handles. With light wood, you can also use darker handles, gold, bronze, or even colors.

To learn more about home staging, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Home Staging Tip of the Day: 5 Renovations to Avoid

Home staging often requires repairs and, sometimes, even rennovations. Here 5 rennovation projects to avoid:

· Adding high end appliances to a modest home
· Adding hand painted tiles to the bath or kitchen
· Adding a central vacuum
· Adding air conditioning (unless you are in an area that all homes have it)
· Replacing windows with newer models

To learn more about home staging techniques, buy 301 Simple Things You Can Do to Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought.

Is Home Staging Cost Effective?

One of the most important things you can do to sell your home quickly and for the highest possible price is to “stage” it. The proof is in the pudding:

• According to the National Association of Realtors, for every dollar sellers put into staging, they get $4 back
• The average increase over the listing price is 6.32%. On a $500,000 house, that is nearly $32,000 and will more than pay for your professional real estate agent! Think of home staging as a way to get your real estate agent for free!

A real estate professional has the knowledge, experience, and qualifications to sell your home. A home stager has the knowledge, experience, and qualifications to prepare your home for the sale. Although professional services are not free, the cost of the services more than exceeds the benefits received!

Learn more about home staging by purchasing 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW.

Why Does Home Staging Matter?

When it comes to sales, first impressions are everything. A potential homebuyer will often decide to enter a home based on the outside appearance. And once inside, they make up their mind about a home within about 10 seconds. This means that you have 10 seconds to create an atmosphere that entices the imagination and creates a longing in the buyer.

Home staging is the way to create that desire and longing. Through home staging, you can put your home’s best foot forward.

Learn more about home staging by reading 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW.

What Is Home Staging?

Home staging is simply the art of preparing your home for sale. Basically, there are five steps to home staging:

• · Cleaning
• · Getting rid of clutter
• · Depersonalizing
• · Decorating and accessorizing
• · Maintaining

In days gone by, home staging consisted of advice by your real estate agent to “clean up” and “de-clutter.” If you had a savvy agent, you may have even been told to add fresh flowers or fresh linens in the bathroom. However, being a real estate professional is not the same thing as being a design professional.

Learn more by purchasing 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW.

Home Staging: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Words like “Faster” and “More Money” call to mind “The check is in the mail” or “This won’t hurt a bit.” Yet, hidden trends explain how using a professional home stager to get your house ready to be put on the market creates huge dividends for home sellers in case after case.

Home staging is the process of preparing a home for sale. For years it was a function performed by the realtor and consisted mostly of the standard advice to remove clutter, to keep the front yard well manicured, and bake cookies just before each showing. Now the process of home staging has become a specialty with professionals who understand the changing dynamics in residential real estate.

As in nearly every field, the Internet has driven significant changes in the process of selling your home. If you go about it next time like way you did even three years ago, the odds are you will overlook opportunities for getting buyers more quickly and increasing the financial gain from selling your home. And you may get little or no return on the money you use to “get the house ready to sell” as your house competes with homes that have been professionally staged.

With many sellers finding their homes worth more than they anticipated during the latest “real estate boom”, the advantages the Internet gives to buyers at the disadvantage of sellers and the changes in the role of realtors have hardly been noticed. Several simple observations about these changes are revealing in understanding why professional home staging has become such a good investment.

Find out about each of these observations by reading earlier blogs. Buy the book 301 Simple Things You Can Do NOW by clicking here.

Home Staging For Investment Returns

Sellers are seeking to maximize return for the investment and risk of home ownership--an investment transaction, not just a real estate sale. The appreciation (increase in value) of real estate is the biggest source of wealth in this country. The sales price of your current home determines how much you can invest in the next one, and the bigger that investment the bigger your “dividend” will be when it is time to sell again. With average ownership of a home between 4 and 7 years, getting top dollar every time compounds your net worth quickly. Leaving money on the table eats into your return for years and years to come.

Home staging helps maximize that return. According to the National Association of Realtors, for every dollar sellers put into staging, the sellers get $4 back. The average increase over the listing price is 6.32%, enough to cover your realtor fees. On a $500,000 house the added value of staging is $32,000! No wonder the professional staging trend started in northern California, one of the hottest markets in the country.

Learn more by reading other blog entries. Purchase the book 301 Simple Things You Can Do NOW To Sell Your Home by clicking here.

Home Staging Allows the Buyer to Buy a Life Style

In a real estate transaction, the buyer is buying a life style, not a house! Buyers coming through the doors today want to see what their new home will be like. They are busy visualizing how it fits their needs rather than assessing how nice this stranger’s house looks. They are checking to see if their furniture will fit, determining eating arrangements, considering traffic patterns, deciding where to hang the family heirloom, and a myriad of other things.

Professional home stagers specialize in techniques that make it easier for the prospective buyer to visualize the house fitting them. Each home is unique with features that could be positive or negative. The professional home stager is the specialist that sees things from the point of view of buyers and gives a house an emotional appeal. These specialists are themselves imaginative and can come up with a plan that will enhance the ambiance in a way that fit several different potential lifestyles. In some cases, the best return on a house is obtained by aiming at a very specific target audience. Knowing what approaches fit your home is what creates the value delivered by the home staging professional.

To learn more, keep reading! To buy the book 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW, click here.

Home Staging: Buyers Have Access To Listings, So You Have To Stand Out!

Prospective buyers now have the same access to listings of homes as real estate agents. The contents of multi-listing services, once closely guarded by realtors, is now readily available on the Internet. This has tilted the market structure to favor buyers who know what is on the market while the sellers are not yet able to identify the prospective buyers. Search engines like Google make it easy for buyers to gather all kinds of community information. All this has reduced the buyers’ dependence on realtors. Prospects are now capable of handing the realtor a list of what they want to see before the realtor’s list is out of the drawer! These prospective buyers go into the home and almost instantly form an emotional reaction to what they see and feel. One misplaced picture or one too many pieces of furniture can prove the instant death knell of interest in a home. Prospects know there are alternatives and will quickly be off to the next home on their list. Over time this can produce a seller’s nightmare - an empty house. An empty house gives off a distressed feel - a sense that the owners may dump the property fast and cheap. Ironically, buyers have more difficulty visualizing life in an empty house, perhaps explaining the greater difficulty of selling them.

With professional home staging, saving time means more money. According to a recent study, homes that had not sold in an average of 4.5 months after listing sold within a week of being staged by a professional. Homes staged before listing were under contract more than twice as fast as comparable homes that had not been professionally staged. The old adage the first impression is the only one that counts has always applied to real estate but not with the impact it has now. Just avoiding the problems not noticed by the untrained eye is reason enough for a professional home stager. Home staging professionals carefully prepare for the first critical 10 seconds to create an atmosphere that entices the imagination and creates a longing in the buyer that leads to further investigation—and a possible sale. It has long been understood that the sooner a house is sold after going on the market, the greater the probability that it also commands a higher price.

To learn more, keep reading! To buy the book 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW, click here.

Home Staging: Simple Makes Houses Sell

One person’s treasure is another’s trash. The steps of cleaning, getting rid of clutter, depersonalizing, decorating and accessorizing, and maintaining are well known and checklists abound to tempt the do-it-yourselfer. However the beloved picture painted by your dearly loved grandmother, hanging in its hallowed place in the foyer, may well be the same one that created the death knell mentioned before.

The judgment of the objective, professional home stager lies at the heart of the value they add. Professional home staging involves more than pointing out the chair that “sets off” the room for homeowner also makes the room look too small. Years of living in a home make it difficult for the do-it-yourselfer to see their home used for lifestyles different than their own. The one-size-fits-all approach produced by the same time worn techniques usually results in a bland impression that fails to ignite the prospect’s imagination. A professional home stager thoughtfully creates a carefully customized impression of your home that results in quicker sales and higher prices.

Learn more about home staging by purchasing 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW.

Home Staging Vs Listing

In today’s market, a listing agent should be a professional who specializes in delivering the greatest number of qualified potential buyers. The home stager is the professional that will create an even greater return on investment on your biggest asset. With so much at stake, it is no wonder that professional home staging has become such a highly valuable and rapidly growing specialization.

To learn more about home staging, buy the book 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW!