How to Use Design Psychology to Stage Your Home for a Top-Dollar Sale

A new business venture to help home sellers, home staging, assists property owners in preparing their home for the best possible sale. Home stagers visit your home and either tell you how to redesign it or actually do the work for you. These services do great work, but they don't always understand interior design. They know what sells houses, but many home stagers could benefit from a little interior design and marketing psychology training to assure the homeowner of a top-dollar sale.

How does design psychology help stage your home for a top-dollar sale? Design psychology helps you with emotions: yours and your prospective buyers. You must learn to love your house at the same time you learn to let go of your home. When you remember why you bought your home in the first place and clean it up with love, your care radiates throughout. Your buyers pick up on the undercurrents in your home; they want to buy happiness and a new lifestyle. You need to let go of your home so that you can be objective about staging your house. Thinking of your house as an investment or product for sale clears your emotions to pack up your personal treasures, which showcase your personality. This means that you create a new setting for your buyers, one that allows them the freedom to visualize their own personal treasures in your rooms.

Design psychology also helps you make easy choices in your home makeover. Understanding the target buyers' emotions means that you know what to leave in your home and what you need to take out for staging. Beyond the usual de-cluttering and super cleaning, you stage your home with suggested activities that speak to your buyers' feelings. Home buyers desire to feel happy, relaxed, and smart about their home choice. Therefore, make over your home with design details, such as colors, lighting, patterns, and textures which support the buyers' feelings. Happy colors depend on the selling season; use warm colors in cool climates and cool colors in warm seasons. Balance with relaxed colors like grays and sky blues. Stage "smart" activities like reading and playing chess.

Also, you will know, without a lot of agonizing, which colors to paint the exterior. For instance, perhaps you only need to repaint the front door to attract your specific type of buyer. If your property costs less than the average home in your market, you're targeting first-time home buyers. These buyers--typically young and unsophisticated--prefer basic, uncomplicated colors. If you're selling during warm weather, you want to offer a cooling oasis. Maybe, like 80% of houses, your home is basic tan or cream. In this case, you would choose blue or green to freshen your front door.

Design psychology methods help you makeover your home with the buyer's profile in mind. House buyers pick the home they can't live without, even if it costs more than the house next door. Stage your home to attract your target buyers' emotions and sell your home, fast, for top dollar.

Copyright (c) 2005 Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.

Jeanette Fisher, author of "Sell Your Home for Top Dollar--FAST!" "Home Staging for Top-Dollar Sales," and other books, teaches professional real estate investing seminars and Design Psychology college courses. For more articles on selling: http://www.sellfast.infoRead about Home Staging: http://www.homestaging.us