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.info Read about Home Staging: http://www.homestaging.us

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.

Nearly two million Americans could benefit from mortgage relief from the nation’s biggest banks, as part of a broad government settlement to be announced on Thursday.

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.