Selling Our Home - Staging & Showing

After that intense week we spent getting our home into her very best state, we listed. Immediately, we started receiving calls from our realtor's office. Showing after showing request rolled in. It would later turn out that over the course of 4 days, we would have 20 showings! Amazing, really. We couldn't have dreamed of a better response. Luckily, the photos the real estate agent's photographer took of our home (below) turned out phenomenally. These images of our home as we had staged it for sale, combined with our realtor's dynamic marketing approach, seemed to play a pivotal part in attracting many potential buyers and fortunately enough, a quick offer. 

For the next time we move (which I hope, by the way, isn't for a very long time) I want to remember a couple things we did this time around that seemed to help things move along rather efficiently. Because any steps that make staging/showing/selling a home a less stressful experience are steps I want to remember :)

• Minimize: We took down all extraneous and overly personal decor. We didn't want the home to present sparse, but at the same time, we didn't want potential buyers having difficulty looking past our stuff and our style to imagine themselves living there. This wasn't a huge exercise since we tend to keep our house fairly uncluttered, but little decor items and extra personal pictures we packed away in storage to give the home a cleaner slate so to speak. 
• Shuffle/Remove: We moved some furniture around to better showcase the floorspace and square footage of our home. The way we typically have our furniture works well for us day to day, but potential buyers might not need the furniture arranged that way or be able to easily see past our furniture arrangements to better view the bare bones of the home. A specific example of this was that we shortened up our dining table by removing a leaf and tucked it into the corner of the kitchen nook. This helped showcase a larger walking area in between the kitchen/living room and patio. We also got rid of our ottoman that usually resides in our entertainment loft upstairs. For the week we showed the home we were content to kick our feet up on the couch itself while watching TV at night so that space could present as roomier to buyers during showings.
• Natural Light: Natural light is always the best light. And so even when you decide to sell your home in the middle of the summer and you don't have A/C because you live in Alberta, you must leave all your windows open. We had a lot of positive feedback about the incredible natural light the home received. So even the home may have been a bit warm for some visitors, it was light, bright and welcoming. And that's what really mattered. 
• Routine: Before our first day of showings, Ryan and I discussed what our morning routine would be while our home remained on the market. We both remember our families selling homes when we were younger and how stressful the ordeal could sometimes be. Last minute call from the realtor, do a frantic once-over around the home while trying to get your raggedy troop of children to exit the house without touching anything. Major credit to our parents handling the process with jobs, pets AND kids! Even though we don't have kids yet, we knew the experience could be unnecessarily stressful if we didn't plan in advance. So, we each took responsibility for a couple jobs that had to be done each morning. We would have loved to do them at night, but with two furballs running around this joint, these particular jobs needed to be done moments before we left home each morning. So while Ryan vacuumed and washed dishes, I prepared our breakfasts and fed Lincoln and Memphis. After Ryan left, I tossed Lincoln outside to play while I washed the floor quickly and wiped down all the bathrooms. We could usually get everything done in about 20 minutes each morning. We went through this routine whether there were showings booked or not. That would later turn out to be extremely stress relieving since every morning, right after I left the home, I would get a call from the realtor saying they were hoping to show the home within two hours. What a relief to not have to run home to clean things up! 

Overall, we were very fortunate that our home sold as quickly as it did. A prolonged duration on the market, always living in show-home mode, was something we were hoping to avoid. And while the Calgary market is certainly a seller's market at the moment, I have to think that those little tweaks we did to stage and show our home helped the process along. At the end of the day, whatever the reasons our home sold quickly, I'm grateful. Truly grateful.

PS. SO happy the realtor agreed to send me these photos from our sales package/MLS listing! I've never taken a comprehensive photo tour of our home and was meaning to before we moved out. Now I have these! Thrilled to have such great photos of this first home of ours to help us remember. They'll conjure up many fond memories in time, I'm sure :)