Staging Your Portland Home to Sell: What You Need to Know

Everything You Need to Know About Staging Your Home in Portland

If you’re ready to sell your Portland home, congratulations! This is an exciting new chapter in your life as a real estate owner. We trust you’re working with an experienced and dedicated selling agent – and if you’re not, be sure to get in touch with Urban Nest today!

This post is meant to help you get the basics of home staging, so you can assist your Realtor in the process of selling your home, putting your property in the best light. In order to prepare yourself for the process, it’s important to be well versed in the tactics of staging a Portland home for success.

So how will you make your home stand out during a buyer’s busy day of open houses?

Pro Tip #1: In PDX, It’s Important to Stage for the Season

Selling a Portland home in July is different than selling a Portland home in January, and the immediate concerns of the buyer will inevitably vary. It’s important to remember that when you're staging a home, you want to stage a home for the season. In the summer, it’s important to mind curb appeal, to control air temperature, and to decorate with summer accents on an open house day.

While other selling seasons may have you checking the furnace and focusing solely on indoor areas, summer selling season in Portland goes beyond these indoor checkpoints.

To assist in staging your home for success, be sure to focus heavily on outdoor areas: set up a hammock, add tomato starts to your garden, or set up your colorful and well-kept yard furniture. These outdoor details will help your home’s future owner envision summer months spent outdoors.

Pro Tip #2: When Staging, Keep It Simple

While it’s easy to amass a number of personal items over the years you’ve spent living in your Portland home, in order to stage your home to sell, it’s important to pay attention to the details.

From our experience, homes sell the best when they’re simple – when it’s easy for the buyer to see a blank canvas and to imagine (and picture) their own experiences inside the home.

Imagine this: there’s a nondescript wicker basket with pasta noodles, tomato basil sauce, bell peppers, and garlic — a potential buyer sees these items and starts to think about what it would feel like to be cooking dinner in the space.

Even if you have a beloved set of your grandmother’s china, we recommend putting your heirlooms aside for an open house. Creating simple scenes that help buyers envision their lives in the home is important when staging your home for success.

Pro Tip #3: Watch Out for Pets

During the summer, the heat outside can impact the ambiance of the rooms indoors in a unique way – and this includes the way things smell. If you’ve got pets, be extra mindful of cats and dogs shedding their winter coats, and pet odors causing foul smells in the rooms they love to hang out in the most.

Before an open house, consider vacuuming the rugs and doing some serious dusting where bright summer light is sure to put extra focus on things. Before open house season starts, you can always rent an affordable rug shampoo machine and tackle the job yourself without breaking the bank. Last, be sure to move the cat’s litter box to a place where it won’t bother anyone touring the home.

Pro Tip #4: Rely on Professional Photos to Finish Your Staging

Once your home is perfectly staged for the season and decorated with minimal personal decor, there’s one more thing you can to do help you stage your home for sale in Portland: take professional photos. While prospective buyers’ impressions at your open house are important, it’s equally valuable to make sure your listing photos show the best version of your home.

To attract a strong pool of applicants to your open house, make sure you enlist the help of a professional (who could be a friend or relative!) to take well-lit, well-composed photos of your staged home.

How have you staged your Portland home for success? Do you have summer staging tips? Let us know! We’d love to hear more.

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Selling Your PDX Home in Summer: Tips from Urban Nest