Staging Homes for Top-Dollar Sales

Wouldn't it be nice to have Roger Hazard's design team from "Sell This House" come visit for a weekend?

Many "redecorators" and designers offer "Staging Homes" services from $250 to $5,000. These services usually give good advice, some help with the actual work involved, and others even move in new furniture for you.

However, using Design Psychology strategies will help you make the right choices on what is necessary to stage your home for a top-dollar sale.

Residential Design Psychology encompasses your entire home setting, from the fist sighting, whether your home is a condominium, single family home, or a manufactured home. Design Psychology, based on years of research on how our environments affect our emotions, helps stage homes with the buyers' emotions in mind. Also, this interior decorating system uses the underlying physiological response to design details-- how our senses react to colors, patterns, textures, and furnishings, to entice a buyer to REALLY want your home.

Home buyers make their ultimate home selection based on their emotional reactions to the properties they visit. The way their brains interpret what they see, hear, touch, smell, and even taste causes them to feel connected to the home they choose. Buyers may think they make a choice based on economics, but even this decision is based on the way they feel because they're getting a deal.

You, as a home seller, have two initial choices.

1. Sell your home as a bargain to investors or bargain shoppers with limited income, or

2. Sell your home for top dollar to your target market.

To prepare your home to sell to investors and bargain shoppers, all you need to do is look for a real estate agent who does a lot of advertising. This agent will list your home under market value. Then sit back and allow the agent to sell your home for a rock-bottom price. Don't be surprised when you get many offers for lower than your asking price right away.

If you want to work a little, or perhaps a lot, you can sell your home for top dollar. Explore ways to create a buyers' dream home. Because buyers let their emotions rule their decisions, stage your home for your specific buyer profile. Learn how certain colors, textures, and even plants help attract buyers who will spend more money on your home. Get busy removing clutter, packing memorabilia, staging, and sell your home for top dollar. Don't be surprised when you get many offers for more than your asking price right away.

You may be able to assemble your own team of friends to help you clear out your crowded rooms, paint, and spiff up your gardens. Who needs Roger Hazard's team when you've got a few good friends and Design Psychology?

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

Jeanette Fisher, Design Psychology Professor, is the author of "Sell Your Home for Top Dollar--FAST! Interior Design Psychology Secrets for Optimum Selling in Any Market," and other real estate and interior design books. For more information on staging your home for sale, visit http://sellfast.info/ Staging Houses for Sale Questions? Sell Fast Blog/

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

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.

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.

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.

A Ditmas Park co-op, Upper East Side co-op and an Upper West Side condo.

A 10-year-old house with six bedrooms in Montvale, N.J., and a renovated four-bedroom in Bronxville, N.Y.

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.

In Manhattan, parking lots and garages are making way for all sorts of development, especially luxury condominiums.

Gray Burton lives in a 250-square-foot space he furnished with antiques he’s been collecting for years.

A photogenic Westchester suburb with high-profile residents is also known for its art museum and a performing arts center.

Wealthy investors are wiring millions of dollars to New York to snatch up a piece of 157 West 57th Street - what will be New York City's tallest residential building, with 90 floors overlooking Central Park.

An apartment at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, opposite Central Park, was bought anonymously through a limited liability company.

Homes in Dallas, Rhode Island and Denver.

A Ditmas Park co-op, Upper East Side co-op and an Upper West Side condo.

A 10-year-old house with six bedrooms in Montvale, N.J., and a renovated four-bedroom in Bronxville, N.Y.

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.