Highlight Specialty Rooms When Selling Home

Written by Posted On Thursday, 04 September 2014 11:24

Many homeowners understand the importance of making their kitchen, master bedroom, and bathroom stand out when it comes to selling their homes.

But helping buyers see other areas of the home that are designed for special purposes, such as a media room, kids' study hall, or art studio can also generate a lot of buyer interest.

If you have a room or space in your home that isn't really being used, consider staging it as a specialty room. Perhaps it lets in the perfect morning light for an artist studio. You can place an easel and some art decor that helps buyers visualize how they might creatively use this space.

Maybe you have a room that would make a good space to stage an exercise center. If you have exercise equipment scattered throughout your home, it might work well to combine the pieces into one room. This gives the room a purpose. Instead of having one piece of exercise equipment in multiple rooms, the buyer now sees one room designed for exercising. It also removes the extra clutter of clunky exercise equipment from rooms such as bedrooms and living rooms. Buyers can then see those rooms more clearly without things in them that don't really look like they belong.

If you have a media room, a place where you watch TV, listen to music, read, keep it for those purposes when you're showing off your home to potential buyers. Take out the things that don't fit with that specialty room. Maybe you've been storing extra boxes off in one corner of the room or it's become the junk room for the family....time to change that. Clean it up, work to remove the clutter and highlight how this media room has been a hit for your family.

Home offices are very popular but when they look like an office plus a kid's playroom, it's hard for buyers to imagine being able to get any work done there. Take the toys and other items that don't belong in an office out. Either put them away, give them away, or throw them away.

If you don't have an entire room set up for a children's study area, no worries. Remove excess toys and memorabilia from the children's bedrooms and create a small space for a reading/study nook. Highlight for buyers to see it as the space where great minds come to learn, absorb, and innovate.

You don't have to redo entire rooms in order to create and highlight specialty rooms. Usually, it's just a matter of taking out items that don't belong in a particular room, maybe shifting furniture to other rooms, and then reorganizing the room so it has a purpose. When you do this, the message translates to buyers. They can see how you used the space and how much it may help their own lives.

Preparing your home to sell involves removing items that don't serve a purpose. If you don't remove the clutter, buyers may not see your home as beautiful and highly functional–two vital components that can encourage them to make an offer.

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Phoebe Chongchua

Phoebe Chongchua is an award-winning journalist, an author, customer service trainer/speaker, and founder of Setting the Service Standard, a customer service training and consulting program offered by Live Fit Enterprises (LFE) based in San Diego, California. She is the publisher of Live Fit Magazine, an online publication that features information on real estate/finance, physical fitness, travel, and philanthropy. Her company, LFE, specializes in media services including marketing, PR, writing, commercials, corporate videos, customer service training, and keynotes & seminars. Visit her magazine website: www.LiveFitMagazine.com.

Phoebe's articles, feature stories, and columns appear in various publications including The Coast News, Del Mar Village Voice, Rancho Santa Fe Review, and Today's Local News in San Diego, as well as numerous Internet sites. She holds a California real estate license. Phoebe worked for KGTV/10News in San Diego as a Newscaster, Reporter and Community Affairs Specialist for more than a decade. Phoebe's writing is also featured in Donald Trump's book: The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying Foreclosures. She is the author of If the Trash Stinks, TAKE IT OUT! 14 Worriless Principles for Your Success.

Contact Phoebe at (858) 259-3646 or [email protected]. Visit PhoebeChongchua.com for more information.

www.phoebechongchua.com/

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