Selling During the Holidays?
/Selling During the Holidays?
Summary
When selling your home during the holidays, it is important to consider how your decor will impact your photos and how buyers view your home. Just like staging year-round, you want to make sure your decor highlights the assets of your home and appeals to a wide variety of buyers to bring you the highest offers in the least amount of time. Here are some crucial tips to consider when preparing your home for the holidays!
First, even when selling during the holiday season, you want to make sure your home is free of all holiday decor until after your professional photographs have been taken. Your listing should always feel fresh, new, and ready, and seasonal decor can make MLS photos feel stale once the holiday season has passed.
Next, once your photographs have been taken, it’s time to add a festive feel to your home in small amounts! You want to address areas such as a mantle, tabletops, and, possibly add seasonally appropriate pillows in a living room or bedroom. Garland, faux florals, and small accessories such as pumpkins or Christmas trees, are an easy way to keep decor minimal, yet fun for potential buyers. The ultimate goal is to make your home feel festive, without going overboard.
Finally, it can be easy to want to skip decorations all together when getting ready to sell your home. However, this can sometimes have a negative effect on the buyers’ experience. You want buyers to feel the energy of the season and begin to envision their own lives there. A great way to determine where to add decor so the process doesn’t feel overwhelming is by surveying what your eyes are drawn to in a certain room. For example, if your large fireplace is a key asset in your home, consider adding decor to your mantle to highlight this feature even further.
These are just a few great ways to help you find balance in your festive flare while selling your home this holiday season! Happy Holidays!
Transcript
Alright. Hello. Thanks for coming today and watching this. I hope everyone's having a great holiday season and really enjoying the holidays despite the whole COVID situation. You know, 2020 is going to come to a close and COVID is just going to sail on through to 2021, which is a bit of a bummer. But I guess we're all getting by, right? So let's talk about listing your house during the holiday season and kind of what to do when it comes to decor, when you're listing your house to sell. So when it comes to listing your house, the number one thing we're always keeping in mind is to make sure to sell the assets of your home and appeal to the most buyers as possible. So when we're staging and making those kinds of decisions, we're looking for neutral color palettes, you know, not super style specific, not very personal and something that just keeps, you know, that again, appeals to the most buyers.
If they're coming through the door, we want to appeal to them. So the same principles apply as we move into the holiday season and the choices you make when it comes to decorating. So for tips, I have three different tips to consider when you're going to list your house. First, if let's say you're listing to your house in December, right? You're getting ready for Christmas. You're about to have Christmas throw up all over your house. At least this happens in my house, right? Bows everywhere, red pillows. Oh my gosh. We want it all, right! When it comes to staging your house, as far as the, sorry, selling your house and decorating your house you really gotta hold back until after those pictures are taken. So what you want to do is have your house staged, get everything ready.
You have everything perfect. Make your house look perfect for photos. Photo day, when your photographer comes in, take the pictures from MLS, keep it decor free of holiday things. And the reason is, let's say it's the middle of December. You're getting your pictures done. Your listing is going to go live. You know, a couple of days after that, then it's Christmas. And then it's January. Well, what we don't want is to have pictures on the MLS with your Christmas tree on it. It's going to feel stale to buyers when they’re looking, and we don't want that. We always want your home to show hot, new and ready. Right? So just wait. Once the photographer kind of has come in, they have taken these gorgeous pictures. What I want you to do is add a little, add a little Christmas, right? Add a little Hanukkah. This is when you do want to bring in some seasonally appropriate decor in a small amount.
So don't make it you know, I don't want it to look like Tinseltown or, you know, Santa's workshop, but you know, doing a couple tasteful things. So I've actually filmed up here in my living room today because I have some decorations from Thanksgiving which can help guide you as you're making the choices on what to decorate. So, you can see we kinda, I kind of dressed our mantle, just minimally, you know, a little bit of a Garland, some vases and faux floral that, fit the season, as well as tabletop, you know, a little pumpkin, let's see, there you go again, different flowers than I normally would have. So it feels festive. We have a Turkey over there, some pumpkins, so not too much, you know, my kids were super happy about it. They liked the decorations.
That's really what matters, right? We feel a little festive, but we don't need to go overboard with all things, orange, pumpkin, and squashes for Thanksgiving. Right. Just a little bit less. So take what you have, address your countertops. No, sorry, not your countertops, address your mantel, tabletops, and maybe some you know, if you have some great throw pillows in your bedroom or living room, that would be okay as well. Just tone it down and keep it minimal. On the other side of that, and my third tip is don't be a scrooge. So, you know, it might feel time to say let's not do anything, you know, we're listing in December. We don't want to, you know, we don't want to turn off buyers, so we'll keep it, we'll forget there's even holidays. That's not a great idea either.
So bring in some of your decorations, like I suggested in a minimal way and make sure buyers can feel the energy of the season, right? We want them to start envisioning, you know, not just their lives there, they have the opportunity right now. If you have a little bit of, let's say we brought some Christmas decorations and now they're looking at that dining room table as maybe future gatherings, for when we get together with people again, gathered around that dining room table. You have lots of room for seating, your cozy Christmasy living room it appeals to them on an emotional level. So we still want that to happen. It's just kind of like with everything, with getting your house ready to sell, you don't want too much Christmas or holiday and you don't want nothing. You need to find just a nice balance.
And you know, and find that balance a lot of times, as you look at the room survey the decor, maybe you've placed and say, okay, where are my eyes drawn to, right. If I want to put some decorations on the mantle and bring in, so that kind of draws your attention. Now, if you have a great fireplace, that's an asset of your home. That absolutely you want the attention drawn there, right? If you have you know, a really great cozy living room, that seats a lot, you know, so those pillows will draw attention to the seating that you have there. So think about how you're selling the assets of your home when you're placing that furniture. And where you're bringing the eye of the buyer. Of course, this is where your stager can help you too. So you don't have to think about all those things. That's what we're here for! But there's a few tips on how to incorporate holiday decor during the holiday season and how to still sell your home during this time. Thanks!