Grand Little Place

Home staging is proven to sell homes faster. Use these tips & tricks for staging an empty house to sell fast. Easy soft staging on a budget!

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Selling a home, even in the best of circumstances, is one of life’s more stressful events.  Home staging is a proven way to sell a home faster for the highest price possible.  (Check out these statistics!) But what do you do if the home is empty?  My dad found himself in this situation recently.  With a few key items we staged & photographed this house in a few hours.  The realtor experience on this home was less than ideal.  After the house sat on the market for months she recommended dropping the list price of the home (which she had set) and recommended an offer to us for $30k under asking.  With the help of staging and improved photos my dad was able to sell the house for the full asking price and without several of the concessions the realtor had advised him to do.  THAT is the power of staging my friends!

When staging an empty home you need to think of ‘soft staging’.  Soft staging means adding the minimal amount of items for the maximum amount of impact.  In this 3 bedroom, 2 bath home we focused on staging 1 bedroom (the master), the dining room, kitchen and 1 bathroom.  We chose those areas to highlight the biggest selling features of the home.  This house had been renovated to add a new kitchen and bathroom.  We also wanted to showcase the paneled dining room, hardwood floors and some of the vintage details that gave this house charm.

On the blog I try and primarily add vertical photos because they have the best impact.  Real estate listings tend to use mostly horizontal.  I’m showing both on this post because I wanted to show the difference each orientation has on a room.  You can have vertical photos on a real estate listing, but they tend to get scaled or cropped so it really is best to stick to horizontal.  Also note that I am not a professional real estate photographer.  I do own professional equipment but I don’t own a  wide angle lens. Real estate photos are usually taken with a 16mm lens, these were taken with a 24-105mm.

All the items we used we already owned.  We grabbed a square folding table and 2 spare chairs.  I grabbed the colored placemats and dishes to create contrast against the built ins and white tablecloth.  Although the set up doesn’t have magazine worthy vibes, what it does do is define a space.  It gives buyers an idea of scale and allows them to envision themselves eating there.  In the newly renovated kitchen I kept it very simple.  We added place settings, but no stools, to the eat in counter.  A hand towel was draped over the sink area.  I did not add any decor to the counters because the galley kitchen is already small and I didn’t want to add any additional clutter.  (If the home had been occupied I would have recommended clearing the counters anyway.)

With the renovation a wall had been removed which opened the kitchen/dining area to the living room.  Since we staged the dining area I purposefully did not add furniture to this living room wall.  This photograph was taken to show the openness of the space and how they connected together.

In the three photos below you can see the various angles used to show the living room.  They were all taken with the goal of showing how spacious the room is.  I could have staged this room in lots of different ways.  You will often see people recommend adding an area rug to an empty room.  I purposefully did not to this because I didn’t want eyes to be focused on a smaller square in the open floor. I wanted buyers to be drawn to the contrast, which is the perimeter of the space, where the dark floors meet the light walls.  By having the focal point be the back corner, with the table and lamp, your eyes are drawn across the large floor.  This in turn makes the room look spacious.

In these two living room photos the windows are also able to shine.  The front door was left open for more light to be added.  It is a solid door and if I would have left it closed in the photo it would have made the room visually smaller.

In this 3 bedroom home we very simply staged 1 bedroom – the master.  We used one of my favorite staging hacks to set up this bed.  We grabbed 4 milk crates, an air mattress, and a coverlet with a built in skirt.  We wrote a small note for the top of the bed that read ‘do not sit on bed’ just in case. 🙂  If you don’t have milk crates you could just as well use empty boxes or stacks of books to hold up your air mattress.

I much prefer how the vertical images look of these empty bedrooms, but knowing that the horizontal images would be best on the listing I positioned the bed where it would get the most impact in the photo and in the space.  When staging a room do your best to pull beds away from the wall so you can walk around both sides. This is a subtle hint that the room is spacious.

In empty bedrooms, just leave them empty.  Don’t add a rug – let the eyes be drawn to the floor and ceiling lines.  If the scale of furniture is wrong it has the opposite effect.  If the rooms are small – as these are – staging could even have the opposite effect and make a room appear smaller.

Everything in this bathroom was new – and we wanted it to look NEW.  I debated adding a shower curtain but in the interest of time and money I skipped it.  The bonus effect is that the bathroom gained a few additional feet of visual space without the curtain/bar.  We added a small towel to the side of the vanity and called it good.

This home was actually very charming.  It was a mid century ranch with lots of little details.  Since the home was empty and we wanted to play up as many features as we could I made sure to photograph some of the smaller details to be included with the listing.

Staging an empty house does make a difference.  It helps buyers picture themselves in the home and makes the space seem more cared about.  It may seem unnecessary in a hot market – which this home was in – but it could be the thing to make a difference.  If you are in the position of needing to sell a house quickly hopefully these staging an empty house tips and tricks help you like they helped us!

For more tips on home staging check out my Complete Guide of Home Staging!

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