Vital Rooms to Stage in a Large Listing
Selling a large home can be daunting. And with such an expansive space, staging is simply necessary to convey the size available to a buyer.
But staging every room in a 5+ bedroom listing costs money, and oftentimes homeowners are on a tight budget. So, which rooms should you focus your attention on so that the stager can make the most of a huge space?
Living Room
This may seem obvious, but the main living room in a large home is the focal point. In most cases, the main living room is the first room prospective buyers enter at the start of a showing, and is the first room displayed on an online listing. Prospective buyers will remember how this room is staged more than almost any other room in the home. Being able to comfortably fit one or two sofas as well as a few accent chairs on top of an 8x10 rug will showcase just how much space a living room has to utilize. Depending on the amount of natural light the living room gets (which typically is plentiful), the stager will be able to choose furniture and accessories that complement such a lovely feature.
Master Bedroom
Once they’re finished viewing the living room, prospective buyers are going to make a beeline for the sanctuary of the master bedroom. This room is where they’ll spend the majority of their resting time, so you’ll want to have it staged to express its full comfortability. King-sized beds are vital in master bedrooms; ensuring that an ~80 in. king headboard can fit on the bedroom’s largest wall with at least two feet of space on either side for nightstands will convey the size to a prospective buyer. Buyers will want to know exactly how big of a bed they can fit in the master, as well as how much leftover space they have with which to get creative.
Dining Room
Large homes are likely to have a specific location in mind for a dining room, whether it’s delineated by walls or suggested by the placement of a light fixture. Once the correct placement is found, the stager will be able to set up a four to six-person dining table to highlight just how much entertaining space a prospective buyer is working with. Buyers will see the kitchen and then naturally progress to the dining room, so having it staged is necessary.
Kitchen & Bathrooms
There’s not really much “more” you can do to stage the kitchen or the bathrooms in a large home. The build of a kitchen and a bathroom should more or less speak for itself; buyers are primarily going to be looking for counter space and the appliances built into these rooms, neither of which realtors or stagers can change. Adding aesthetically pleasing accessories to the counters, towels to racks, and barstools to kitchen islands certainly never hurts. This gives prospective buyers a “lived-in” feel to these rooms, making them softer and more inviting.
1-2 Spare Bedrooms
The master bedroom is clearly the most important bedroom for a prospective buyer to see, but they’ll also need to see the space available in one or two of the home’s spare bedrooms. Spare bedrooms are generally similar in dimensions, so staging one as a bedroom can translate to all the other ones. Using the same placement rules as the master, making sure at least one of the spare bedrooms can accommodate a queen or full-sized bed and nightstands definitely helps prospective buyers envision themselves living in a home. If one spare bedroom appears smaller than the rest, lots of realtors choose to stage it as an office space. As lots of workplaces are currently transitioning to more work-at-home formats, buyers will appreciate being shown an example of how they can configure their workspaces.