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Just how important is staging your home when it comes time to sell? I'm joined by professional stager Patricia Ebrahimi from Show Smart Staging to help me explain.Buying a D.C. Metro home? Get a full home search Selling your D.C. Metro home? Get a free Home Price EvaluationI'm happy to be joined today by Patricia Ebrahimi with Show Smart Staging for the first of a two-part series about home staging. So why would a Realtor hire a stager? As Patricia says, Realtors simply get better and faster sales when they stage their listings because it creates wonderful photos that bring traffic to a home. The benefit is the same for homeowners; hiring a stager will help their home sell fast for top dollar. We all like that!The first step in staging your home is getting a ‘divorce,’ Patricia jokes. When you sell your house, you turn it into a product for sale. Since people get so emotionally connected to their home, you need to divorce yourself from the house and turn the emotion around so that the buyer becomes emotionally connected and finds the house irresistible. Buyers want what they see on HGTV and in furniture stores because we're a display-oriented society. Over 90% of buyers look at homes online first to choose which homes they want to see in person, and the homes they want to see are always the ones with great photographs that are merchandised. Contrary to what you may have heard, staging is not just another term for interior design. In fact, it's the total opposite, Patricia says. Patricia—a certified interior designer—says being an interior designer means helping someone understand what they like and helping them get it. Staging, on the other hand, aims to neutralize the house to the extent of appealing to the widest array of potential buyers whether you as a homeowner like it or not. This goes back to what Patricia said about divorcing your home. When you get ready to sell, it's not your house anymore, so you have to back off and let it show in a way that buyers want to see. Staging makes your home irresistible to buyers.By and large, home sellers pay for staging because they're the ones seeing about 94% of the proceeds of the home sale. There are exceptions, Patricia says, but most of the time, the seller pays. The good part that many people don't realize is that staging is a tax deduction as a selling expense. If a Realtor pays for the staging, it becomes a marketing expense, not a tax write-off. Stay tuned for the second portion of our series on home staging. If you have any questions about staging your home or you're thinking about selling your house in the D.C. area, give me a call or send me an email. I'd be happy to help you!