There is a special mindset associated with “staging” your home to sell in any market. Staging refers simply to the act of improving your home’s appearance in order to appeal to the widest segment of potential buyers. The approach you must adopt is to see your home through the buyers’ eyes.

Stop looking at your home as “your home,” and start visualizing it as the “product” it becomes when it enters the real estate market. Either a trained real estate agent or a professional home stager can help you to market your product more successfully by highlighting positive features and downplaying less attractive aspects.

Since you may have a strong emotional attachment to your home, you may not fully appreciate hearing about a better way to show your offering, but try to recognize that the way you decorate to SELL may be quite different from the way you decorate to dwell in your home. The appearance of space often trumps its functionality when impressing buyers.

Your goal is to sell quickly at a fair price. A survey by a large national real estate brokerage showed that staged homes usually sell in half the time, and another survey of Realtors showed that by investing as little as a few hundred dollars in staging improvements, the sellers realized more to their bottom line. So be prepared to swallow a little pride, move some furniture, and field better offers on the road to your successful sale.