Enhance your home by considering buyers’ emotions

Since buying a home involves a major life change, it’s understandably an emotionally charged transaction! As a seller, it’s important to consider the emotions involved by a potential home buyer. So, beginning with curb appeal, a seller should create an inviting environment. Mowing the yard, trimming away dead limbs and cleaning up the exterior may take some time, but the result is that the potential buyers think about how nice the home looks from outside and not how much work it is to maintain. And again, inside, a clean and clutter-free home gives the impression of an easy lifestyle, which brings about good, positive emotions.

This emotional side of the transaction is what has brought about the recent art of home staging. Home stagers have a knack for presenting a home in such as way as to bring about positive emotions when buyers walk through. Often they will set the dining table up to look like its awaiting a dinner party! Or they may rearrange and minimize decorations in a family room to give it a fresh look. Some home stagers are familiar with Feng Shui and can make slight changes that seem to bring about good karma!

While exercise equipment is good to have in general, it’s not so good to have it in the master bedroom when trying to sell your home. A buyer will tend to think about exercising when the equipment is right there, and that can break the spell of happy emotions! Likewise, the thought of spending every spare minute working to fix up a house can bring about a feeling of dread. If you’ve purchased a true fixer-upper before, chances are you won’t be ready to do that again in this lifetime – unless you’re a professional home remodeler!

Walking through a home will bring about different emotions to different people. Having walked through hundreds of homes with many different people, I’ve experienced a spectrum of emotions and the various causes. If you are preparing to sell your home, don’t forget to consider the emotional side of things! And if you want an experienced opinion for preparation and staging, contact me! Vikki Goodwin, Realtor, Homes ATX, 512-426-9090.

See a video on home staging.