Home Staging Techniques That Will Help You Sell Your Home

The following home staging ideas will help buyers see themselves living in your home. Not all buyers possess the ability to see past your decor to envision renovating your home to fit their individual style. Price, location, and quality are important, but when checking out your home, buyers are also looking at the style of each room.

If you're selling your home, you're probably aware that there are more homes for sale in Cary NC than there are home buyers, giving buyers the opportunity to be a little selective about choosing a new home.

What Style is Your Home?

If your home has "gone country," "high-tech modern," or any other specific style, it may be costing you the sale. Buyers usually shy away from homes decorated in a too specific style. The only thing worse to buyers than a home with a specific style is a home with no style. In addition, empty homes are sometimes a turnoff to buyers who need furniture to imagine themselves and their furniture in your home. A furnished home helps a buyer envision a different wall color, new curtains, or even changing from carpeting to hardwood floors.

If potential buyers have a hard time picturing themselves in your home because of your florescent pink bathroom, you will lose the sale. Home staging assists buyers in envisioning themselves in your home by helping them picture the home the way they would like it decorated. Try using home staging ideas from home decor magazines, by taking a trip to your local decorating store, or by visiting open houses of other homes for sale to get inspiration for what works and what does not.

Give Rooms a Purpose

Do you hang clothes all over the labyrinth of dusty exercise equipment in your master bedroom? Does your home office really belong in the living room? Is there laundry piled all over your dining room table, giving the impression your home is short on closet space? Take the time to clean your closets, move extra pieces of furniture from cluttered rooms into a storage space, and remove items that don't belong in a room so that each room has a clear purpose. Home staging will help buyers see a room 's potential by showing off the amount of space with an efficient and stylish layout.

Depersonalize Your Home

Your charming collection of thimbles, children 's artwork on the refrigerator, and shelves full of sports trophies may mean a lot to your family, but it makes buyers feel as if they are intruding in personalized home. Move your collections into storage to help buyers picture their things in your home without having to get past your personal belongings. It 's fine to leave up a couple of family photographs, but move every other personal item into storage to help your buyers feel welcome in your home. You want buyers to look at your home, not your possessions.

Clean it Up

Nobody wants to buy a dirty house. It 's easy to overlook the dust bunnies living in the corner when you see them every day, but a buyer will notice them immediately. Clean your home like it 's never been cleaned before. Make sure you maintain the clean you've achieved, even if it requires hiring a house cleaning company. Many cleaning companies offer specials for people selling their homes. This ensures your home is always "ready to be seen" and gives you the time to focus on home staging.

The Exterior is Important

Just because you have finished home staging inside your home doesn't mean you're ready for buyers. Home staging is just as important for the exterior of your home as it is for the interior. Cut the lawn, plant colorful flowers, stain the deck, fill cracks in the driveway, and paint your home if needed to give a great first impression when buyers drive up. A beautiful yard will entice buyers to come inside and give the interior a look.

Home Staging Personalization

These little home staging personal touches will give buyers a good feeling and positive memory when viewing your home. In addition, burn a nice smelling scented candle or put a relaxing CD on the stereo. Place a vase full of your favorite fresh cut flowers in each room to add a personal touch. Packing away your personal items is a wonderful way to depersonalize your home, but consider adding a touch of home staging personalization.

Congress Aims To Make Things Easier For Borrowers

With the Federal Reserve Board taking steps to cut federal interest rates recently, the United States House of Representatives is looking to help out sub prime lenders who are thought to have caused the real estate market turmoil to begin with. The government is doing all that it can to help high risk borrowers secure mortgage loans and a recent piece of legislation is evidence of that.

These risky propositions are often too dangerous for banks to consider, but the Federal government hopes to help these people out with their own insurance policy. It seeks to help people secure mortgage loans by expanding the capability of the Federal Housing Authority to take on more at risk borrowers. The bill, which is expected to run through the House soon, is called the Expanding American Homeownership Act.

The primary goal of the new bill is to give power to the FHA, which stands as the biggest insurer of mortgage loans in the world, to give service to those who might otherwise negatively impact the regular market were they to secure loans through a standard lender. These folks, according to the thought of the federal government, are the kind that would fall victim to excessively high mortgage rates and fall into a huge financial pit with banks.

The bill was first introduced by Representative Maxine Waters of California. Mrs. Waters made comments that indicated her desire to help out those customers who had been pushed into unsafe mortgage loans before. In addition, she indicated that the new bill would do much to help out young home buyers who were getting their feet wet in a market full of tired lenders. There is speculation that the House will pass the bill, as it has gained widespread support among many of the more powerful representatives.

The bill itself is meant to give the FHA more options with which to operate. Their goal had already been to insure high risk mortgages, but now they hope to take it to another level. The bill would give the FHA a chance to charge higher interest rates in conjunction with taking on riskier loans. This would help the government protect itself, while also keeping sub prime borrowers from predatory treatment. In addition, the bill would enable the FHA to insure no money down loans and other low down payment loans, which favor young buyers. This interest in the first time home buyer is an essential aspect of this piece of legislation.

The bill also hopes to offset the rising cost of mortgage loan insurance premiums. These have been rising steadily and the bill would curtail that increase unless there was a primary need for such a rise to cover the cost of insurance claims.

Certain areas of the country would be likely to see a greater benefit from the bill. Places like California, Massachusetts, and New York are known to have larger, pricier loans because of the cost of property in those areas. Because the FHA has long been limited in how much money it can spend to insure a loan, it has been priced out of these markets. Now, it will have an opportunity to participate there, where home values seem to be on a constant rise.

There is another element to the bill which should help the overall real estate market in the long term. It would give the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development the right to assign counseling to home buyers prior to approving a low down payment loan. This change would help create a much more educated home owner base and reduce the chances that a foreclosure could occur. The long term ramifications of such a move could help bring the real estate market out of the downtick that it current faces.

Thus far, there has been good reaction for the legislation from those who provide mortgage loans. The Mortgage Bankers Association, which is a powerful group, has lent its support to the bill at this early stage. There are aspects of the bill which the MBA does not favor, however. A piece of the bill which mentions a long term housing trust is something that, according to the MBA, has the ability to delay the process.

A commitment has been within Congress to protect consumers from any form of unfair treatment. Financial regulators and mortgage loans providers need to do more in this regard, according to many of the House???s top legislators.

Because credit has become so important, Congress knows that borrowers must be protected as much as possible in this regard if they are to qualify for mortgage loans. This way, consumers wouldn???t have to worry about mistakes and falsehoods in their credit report. One way of doing this has been introduced in a bill that would enable the FTC to change guidelines about consumer credit information accuracy.
By getting people on the right track to success, the entire system can find prosperity. These changes, on the whole, should effect some change in the current real estate market.