Home Transformations

Once upon a time, ‘getting your home ready to sell’ meant removing some clutter, rearranging the furniture and maybe doing a bit of painting and some minor repairs. Home staging back them amounted to little more than adding some  decorations, a few paintings and maybe a lamp or two.

Not any more. Now, the goal is to ‘transform’ to the point where the home is often barely recognizable as compared with the starting point. For example:

• Repainting all or most of the home in light colours is almost always recommended. This not only makes the home brighter but also neutralizes the colour scheme. Light grey walls go with everything and offend no-one. Without question, painting is the highest-leverage change that can be made, yielding the largest increase in value at the lowest cost.
• Repairing or replacing anything that isn’t working or that is unsightly (for example an old bathroom vanity with a cracked sink and leaky taps) is another example of a high leverage change that increases value more than it costs.
• Many sellers are also undertaking more significant improvements.  For example, an older kitchen can be revitalized at relatively modest cost by installing a new quartz kitchen countertop, combined with a new backsplash and repainted cabinets. New flooring can also make sense if the existing floors are in poor shape.
• Most or all of the seller’s furniture is packed up and put in storage until the house is sold. The house is then filled with rented staging furniture, artwork and decorations designed to maximize the appeal of the house to the broadest possible range of potential buyers. The aim is stylish and contemporary, but not controversial.

Once the house has been transformed, the next step is photography. Great photos help to catch the eye of buyers shopping on the internet, where attention spans are pretty low. A well staged home, properly captured in top notch pictures, will have buyers 75% sold on the home before they even walk in the front door, which is of course the objective.

Here are some ‘before and after’ examples of homes that we have helped to transform and obtained excellent prices as a result:

Before

After

Before

After 

Before

After

The bar has been permanently raised for sellers in the City of Toronto. No longer is it enough to do a bit of de-cluttering and painting, add some artwork and hope for the best. Buyers now expect a ‘model home’ experience when they view a house for sale, and anything less can deduct thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars from the eventual sale price. The cost of upgrading the home to meet buyers’ expectations is much smaller than this discount, and so more and more sellers are embracing the transformation experience.