Weekly Tips for Long Island homeowners to help you prepare your home for the market.

Selling a vacant home can be difficult. Empty rooms highlight any imperfections in the floors or walls. They can feel cold and bleak, affecting the ability of a buyer to make an emotional connection with the home. Empty rooms appear smaller than furnished rooms and can be confusing to buyers. Only 10% of buyers can mentally picture how their own furniture will fit into a room. Furnishings give the room perspective in terms of scale and proportion, helping buyers visualize where their things will fit. Sometimes it is not clear what the space can be used for and furniture can show its intended use. Empty rooms can also give the impression that the seller might be desperate to sell, possibly carrying two mortgages, which can lower the offers.

Staging a vacant house can resolve these problems. Staging a vacant home adds warmth and comfort, shows how furniture can fit into a room and suggests to buyers the purpose of each room. Ideally, the house should be fully furnished. You can hire a staging company to take care of everything or you can do it yourself by renting or borrowing furniture.

If you are on a budget, then consider vignette staging. Vignette staging uses the bare minimum amount of furniture. Just enough to remove the cold, empty feeling of a vacant house and to let buyers know the purpose of each room. You should at least focus on the entrance, living room, dining room and a master bedroom. The entrance creates the buyers’ first impression of the home, so a potted plant and painting/mirror in this area can make the space feel more inviting. A lightly staged living room could have a chair or couch, a round unfinished wood table covered with a tablecloth, a table lamp, and some large potted plants. The dining room could have a table and chairs, a painting on the wall and some potted plants. The master bedroom should have a bed, a painting on the wall above the bed, nightstands with table lamps, and maybe a dresser.

Whatever level of staging you decide, it will resolve the problem of a vacant house. You will feel confident that you are presenting your home to appeal to prospective buyers.

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