How To Prepare Your Home Like A Luxury Listing

Everybody knows what a luxury listing looks like when they see one. Think spectacular homes set on lush, perfectly manicured green lots, featuring distinctive architectural details, eye-catching interior design and staged to perfection.

Plus, don’t forget about the photography, videography, and marketing materials to make it look even better.

There’s actually an art to making them appear that glamorous and enticing, and it comes down to how they’re prepared.

Although even the very top Realtors® aren’t able to magically make a home larger or more secluded than it actually is, there are a few tricks of the trade that can make a home appear much more desirable before it’s listed.

So, if you’re interested in learning more about how you can make your home look more like a luxury listing — and thereby command a more ‘luxury’ price for it — here are a few of the most effective ways you can prepare your home before you list it for sale.

Learn more about our detailed luxury home prep process and how we can help you sell your home for its maximum value in our Seller’s Guide here.

Start Outside

The very best agents know that every luxury home should start pre-listing preparations outside. Why? Because it’s likely to be the first image of your home that appears on a feature sheet or marketing material and is always the very first part of your home a visiting buyer will see in person.

We call this ‘curb appeal,’ because that’s exactly what it is — how strong the appeal of your home is from a curbside view. Ensuring you make a potential buyer’s first impression of your home as good as it can be from the get-go is the best way to set your sale up for success.

How you initiate that takes a little foresight and planning, however. The best route to take here is to retain the services of a professional landscaper. If that isn’t an option you’d like to pursue, we’d at the very least recommend you consult one as to what you can do on your own.

No matter which way you go, doing things like removing any damaged or dying plants and shrubs from your yard, re-laying sod where your grass has gone yellow or patchy, putting down a fresh layer of mulch or wood chips, adding beautiful planters at the entrance and repainting any accents like doors, window frames, and mailboxes in a fresh and contemporary colour are all great first steps.

At the Tanya Crepulja Team, we rely on a core team of experienced home service and industry professionals to supplement our comprehensive list of real estate services. Find out more about who makes up our suite of recommended professionals here.

Ruthlessly Declutter

Heading inside, the first thing you can do to enhance the appeal to potential Buyers is to ruthlessly declutter your home. Here, the practice of ‘less is more’ should be very much central to what you try to achieve with your declutter.

Your goal here should be to essentially remove any and all unnecessary or superfluous items from your home, especially in high-traffic areas like hallways and doorways and high-use areas like countertops and kitchens. Remove and store all personal items like diplomas, religious items, family photos, and all the extra ‘stuff’. The main objective is to minimize distractions or obstructions of potential Buyers’ sightlines when visiting your home.

Find Neutrality

Also, it’s important that you remove any more unique, personality-driven artwork or decor items unless they are neutral pieces that tie in with the staging and design element that we offer our clients when listing their home. Even though you might have a keen eye for interior design, we are looking to appeal to a wider audience thus paring down on some very bold or dark pieces of art as they can also negatively impact the impression of the home in the photography.

The primary mission for your pre-list decluttering is to make your home feel as neutral as possible. Not only will that leave a blank canvas for a high-end professional home stager to work their magic, but it also opens the door for the widest audience of potential Buyers to envision themselves living in your space.

One of the best things to keep in mind here is that the luxury home buyer audience is diverse. Not all of your potential Buyers will have the same taste and design preferences, which is why it’s important you leave your home looking as neutral and decluttered as possible for when they come to see it. That way, nothing will distract them from picturing their future lives in your home.

Want to see what the latest luxury listings currently available for sale look like? Visit our Featured Listings page here to see what today’s luxury market is like.

Stellar Staging

Now that your home has been thoroughly decluttered, it’s ready to be strategically re-filled by a professional home stager. We always recommend our selling clients work with one of our high-end luxury home stagers, our trusted team are some of the top property stylists in the city. In fact, we believe in the value of professional staging so much that we offer it complementary to our Seller clients.

When talking about staging, the difference between stylish and true luxury homes is how the furniture and overall design of your home perform, not just how your home looks. While you might already have a collection of fantastically tasteful furniture pieces, professional staging is much more focused on creating optimal flow and visual experience for visiting Buyers.

Here, professional stagers use tried-and-tested techniques like the placement and layout of space-appropriate furniture, which optimizes foot traffic and the optical interpretation of room sizes for visiting Buyers. Additionally, stagers expertly know how to use strategically placed mirrors and colour theory to enhance the visual depth of individual rooms.

These, along with many more subtle techniques of staging have the power to make a huge impact on how visitors perceive and experience your home. An experienced professional stager truly knows how to transform even the most average of spaces into luxurious-feeling homes.

Looking for some design inspiration to take your luxury listing up to the next level? Here are 6 Luxury Home Design Trends To Try Right Now.

Re-Think Your Lighting

One of the most underappreciated (and often forgotten) aspects of creating a luxury home showing experience comes down to what your home’s lighting is like. The reason being is that great lighting often goes unnoticed, while poor lighting sticks out like a sore thumb.

While most agents will give you basic lighting recommendations like “turn on all of your light fixtures and open up your blinds,” an agent who regularly lists luxury homes knows how to take things a step further.

With the ultimate goal in mind to make your home feel as light, airy, and serene as possible, a few simple lighting tricks can go a long way. Our first recommendation is to address any harsh fluorescent or LED lights — not only do these give off undesirable ambiance, but they create the impression of intensity in a home, which isn’t necessarily the tranquil appeal luxury homebuyers are looking for.

What Kind of Lighting Works?

Instead, look to install dimmer switches or swap out your bulbs for softer, more complimentary lighting. Once you’ve done that, think about which parts of your home would benefit from additional lighting whether it’s pot lights or fixtures that will complement the room it’s in. Light fixtures in your home should be a cohesive look throughout. Often times a homeowner will overlook the lighting, however, it’s like jewellery to an outfit – you can be dressed to the 9’s but without the accent jewellery the outfit won’t be a perfect 10. Don’t forget to clean all light fixtures as they should not be covered in cobwebs – they should be free of dust and sparkling clean.

Next, it’s vital that you try to include as much natural light in your home as possible. That means opening up all of your windows and interior doors and drawing back any curtains or shades. Hire window cleaners to thoroughly clean the windows inside and out otherwise, it will be a negative impression to a potential Buyer.

A tip to enhance the feeling of airy natural light, you can strategically place mirrors adjacent to windows to reflect new natural light into other spaces.