5 Staging Tips for Selling Your Hamptons Home

If you own a home in the Hamptons, you probably remember looking to buy a home in the Hamptons, and the things you were concerned about them. The world of real estate is a complicated one, and the Hamptons are no exception. If you’re trying to get your home sold, it’s going to take some work, but it is a manageable process if you plan ahead. Here are some tips other homeowners have used to generate interest from potential buyers.

1. Imagine Yourself Driving by Your House

You only get one chance to make a first impression. People are going to be intrigued by the exterior of your home and your yard, whether they are driving around your neighborhood or looking at listings online. So you need to make sure they don’t find anything to be concerned about or anything that they’ll potentially use as a negotiating tool down the road. You could cost yourself a lot in the long run by not taking care of these exterior issues. Get a landscaper to go over the yard — touch up any scraggly bushes or trees, bring any dead patches of grass to life, lay down some mulch in strategic areas. If there’s a time to do any repainting or power washing on any doors, windows, or exterior walls, this is it. Sure, you’ll lay out some cash for this, but look at it as a capital investment. You’d rather sell the house than scrimp on maintenance, right?

2. You Are Selling Someone a New House, Not Your House

Your own design aesthetics may need to take a backseat to the need for appealing to a buyer. It should go without saying that interior touchups — painting, fixing leaks or drywall dents, buffing floors, getting rugs or upholstered furniture steam-cleaned — will go a long way. But you should consider what elements that are distinct “you” might not be someone else’s cup of tea. The artwork might need to be temporarily replaced; furniture may have to be taken out of rooms; windows could be dressed differently. People want to imagine how their belongings, their lives, and their families will fit into the different rooms, and how all those aspects of their potential future will flow together. If there’s too much of “you” in the house, they might not be able to see that. Family photographs, refrigerator magnets, to-do lists — that stuff needs to find a new temporary home that is out of sight. And keep the bathroom clean! Don’t have stray hairs lying in the sink or wet towels lying around.

3. A Good Photographer

Don’t scrimp on this step, or imagine that your cell phone photos will be adequate. Professional photographers are trained to manipulate light and space in ways that make reality pale in comparison. If you give them enough clean lines in every room, and a set of color schemes that they can use as a painterly canvas, they’ll make the outside and inside of the house really pop when it gets listed. And defer to them: When you meet, don’t try to dictate how the house should look. They know what is possible and what will work best, so meet them more than halfway when they ask you to remove certain elements or add others.

4. Get Used to Living Clutter-Free

It might be time to pick up a copy of Marie Kondo’s best-selling book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.” This period of listing and staging means that you’ll not only be expected to get out of the house frequently but also that the detritus of your daily life needs to get dealt with immediately. Junk mail, bills, magazines, dishes, laptops, iPads, gym clothes, shoes — all that stuff needs to be out of sight basically at all times. And you can’t throw this stuff under the bed or in a closet, because buyers will be looking in those areas.

5. Get a Storage Unit

If you’re trying to declutter on a regular basis, it is probably not practical to scramble every time someone wants to look at your property. And if you’re making rooms feel and look bigger by removing pieces of furniture, you can’t just cram it all into a garage or another room. Some of the bigger pieces that you love, in addition to boxes filled with out-of-season clothes or any of the louder artwork in your house, should get a temporary home somewhere else. Remember, even if you have space in the house to keep it, you want to give a potential buyer as much space as possible to imagine their lives in your home — after they sign a contract, that is.