Decorating to Sell a House by Meeting Three Key Needs

Specific marketing campaigns are no longer just for automobiles and designer clothes. Targeted marketing techniques are now applied to houses that are for sale. Decorating your house in a specific manner to facilitate the selling of it is an important aspect of selling and marketing your home; this type of decorating is called home staging.

The goal of this type of decorating is to strategically style to address the psychological needs of the buyer. The buyer has three major needs when they look at the house.

All décor choices you make to sell the house will reflect those needs of the buyer.

The most important tip to keep in mind at all times is that first impressions are critical in every area. The first time a potential buyer sees this house is curb appeal. That first glance they get as they step in the house can sell the house. First impression will happen in each and every room; make that impression awesome!

Remove: This area of staging is very difficult for some homeowners because it involves decorating it as a marketable house not as a beloved home. You do not want anything personal on display. This includes removing all family photographs, all toiletries, mail/bill piles, and all special collectibles. All bathroom and kitchen counters need to be cleared expect for only one or two decorative objects. Generally speaking, remove all wallpaper and paint all rooms a neutral ivory color. This meets the need of being able to imagine living there (and not being distracted by who lives there now)

Clean: The house needs to be absolutely sparkling clean. This includes washing windows inside and out, shining the kitchen sink, dusting baseboards, bleaching grout around tiles. It also needs to smell clean and fresh. The house can not smell of animals or cooking. Do not have daily housekeeping supplies visible to potential buyers. This includes laundry baskets and dish drainers - nothing to remind people that there will be work to do in this house. You want to meet their psychological need of living in an easy, carefree house.

Reduce: This area of staging is the most over looked area by the do-it-yourself home seller. All closets of any kind - (foyer closets, master bedroom closets, linen closet, pantry etc) must only be half full. And that does really mean only ½ full. Also consider taking out the extra living room chair or extra dresser in the bedroom. Pack up items you can do without for the next couple months. You want to show that the house has lots of space and room to grow. This meets the needs of good value for the money.

These three simple but effective decorating techniques can help you market and sell you home for what it is worth.

Julie Dana is a professional Interior Redesigner and Accredited Staging Professional. Her company, The Home Stylist, offers online decorating consultations, do-it-yourself decorating plans and real-estate staging.

Visit http://www.thehomestylist.com/ to take a fun style quiz, vote on a color poll, and sign up for free decorating e-newsletter.

There is something emotionally charged about the buying and selling of New York high-end real estate. How else to explain the juggernaut of reality TV shows about high-end brokers?

After 30 years of marriage, Sharon and Michael Newman decided it was finally time to move from the Catskills to New York City.

On blocks near Kissena Park streets are quiet, houses are small, and the electricity that charges the atmosphere in downtown Flushing is nowhere to be found.

A five-story, seven-bedroom house in Brooklyn Heights has sweeping views of New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline.

Demand is so intense that there are waiting lists in some buildings, and a few landlords report that eager renters are even bidding up rents.

Sales at the very high end of the market barely missed a beat in the recession. But that prosperity hasn’t yet trickled down.

A Flatiron condo, a Midtown South co-op and a Brooklyn Heights carriage house.

A four-bedroom ranch in Montclair, N.J., and a four-bedroom colonial Cape in Babylon, N.Y.

For a century, Roosevelt Island housed a grim penitentiary. It was demolished in the 1930s.

More borrowers are opting for fixed-rate loans with terms other than the standard 30 or 15 years, especially when it comes to refinancings.

Two more glass skyscrapers are added to a group of towers on the waterfront of Long Island City.

Insurance coverage for a co-op unit; when a tenant is ‘blacklisted’; a co-op is smaller than estimated.

The market for $500,000-to-$600,000 houses in Westchester has become especially active.

A shaky real estate market means more sellers are providing buyer concessions, from gift cards to help with paying property taxes.

Houses of worship are adaptable to residential and other uses as congregations dwindle.

The settlement reached last week over questionable mortgage practices by major American banks hardly cracks the iceberg that is the foreclosure mess.

Under the settlement, nearly two million Americans could benefit from mortgage relief from the nation’s biggest banks.

A cold war-era satellite relay station is for sale in California after a Silicon Valley mogul gave up on plans to turn it into a weekend home.

How can I make my front porch more appealing to buyers?

Court hearings meant to protect New York homeowners from foreclosure are hopelessly slowed by endless paperwork and requests for additional information.

The Bay Area and Silicon Valley expect the windfall from the Facebook stock offering to make their in-demand region even hotter.

The house, designed by the architect Eric Fisher, looms over the street like a big industrial arm.

A town house in Dallas, a midcentury modern in Rhode Island and a Tudor in Denver.

Prices in some parts of the country are still off by as much as 25 percent from their 2007 peak.

Trinity Church is the largest landlord in Hudson Square and is part of the effort to rezone the area to residential from manufacturing.

Rising oil prices and a boom in shale exploration are leading companies to add office space in the Houston area, most notably Exxon Mobil.

Ms. de França is the president and chief executive of Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, which focuses on new residential developments.

Meet the real estate broker’s interns: an ambitious group willing to do anything, earn nothing and wake up early on a Sunday to fluff the couch cushions at open houses.

A Flatiron condo, a Midtown South co-op and a Brooklyn Heights carriage house.

A four-bedroom ranch in Montclair, N.J., and a four-bedroom colonial Cape in Babylon, N.Y.

Homes in Dallas, Rhode Island and Denver.

Compare the cost of renting and buying equivalent homes.

For recently divorced men, a new breed of decorators offers help navigating a strange new world.

Plants that light up the winter garden can be found at Broken Arrow Nursery in Connecticut, which has long been a favorite of gardening geeks.

A sister in need drew the painter Beverly McIver back home to North Carolina, unaware that a new beginning was in store for both of them.

A jewelry designer finds striking new objects for storage.

Timothy Sakamoto and Jochen Repolust are part of the small but growing niche making mobile apps focused on specific works of architecture.

To promote an auction of 20th- and 21st-century design, the interior designer Stephen Sills has created a preview exhibition in an apartment at the Apthorp.

Fishs Eddy now sells plates acquired from the archives of the now-defunct Syracuse China Corporation, many more than 100 years old.

The designer Russell Greenberg creates custom baby rattles with ends shaped like profiles of mom and dad.