Staging a Bedroom: Design Tips to Help You Get the Offer of Your Dreams

If you’re looking to receive top dollar from your home, have a speedier sale with less time on the market, and appeal to more buyers online and at showings, you should strongly consider staging your home. Especially when it’s the primary bedroom, this can help nudge buyers toward an offer. Here’s what you need to know about staging a bedroom.

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Staging a bedroom can make a difference

The following statistics from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) Profile of Home Staging survey present data from agents who represent buyers and sellers every day.

• 23% of sellers’ agents reported staging all homes prior to listing them, while 10% staged only the homes they thought would be difficult to sell
• The primary bedroom (81%) is the second most commonly staged room after the living room (91%). The kitchen (81%) and dining room (69%) are also common rooms to stage.
• 24% of sellers’ agents use a staging service, while 22% personally offer to stage the home. Around the same number of sellers’ agents said it depends on the situation (24%).
• When staging a home, 20% of sellers’ agents reported seeing a 1% to 5% increase in the dollar value offered by buyers compared to similar homes.
• 27% of sellers’ agents saw a slight decrease in the time on the market for staged homes
• 44% of sellers’ agents said their clients believed in the importance of traditional physical staging when selling a house

We reached out to top-performing agent Kim Alden of Barrington, Illinois, who has sold over 2,300 homes in her career, and to top agent Maribel Sotuyo of Houston, Texas, who has a record of selling homes quickly, to share their home staging expertise. In this article, you’ll learn the steps to making your home — and specifically your bedroom — more marketable while you create a relaxing sanctuary that buyers can’t wait to move into.

1. Declutter and depersonalize to inspire buyers

When people view a primary bedroom, they try to imagine what their life would be like living there, says Alden. They don’t want to see somebody else’s chaos or clutter. “The last thing buyers want to see is your personal belongings, the pictures of all of your kids, and all of your clutter,” says Alden.

“I always tell people less is more: on your nightstand, have one item like an alarm clock and a lamp; on the other, maybe a lamp and a book. Don’t have your nightstand stacked up with your medicine [bottles] and your books,” advises Alden.

“You want the bedroom to look like a beautiful hotel with a nice clean slate, where the buyer can imagine plopping down, taking a nap, and falling asleep.” When you’re staging your bedroom, Alden recommends that sellers envision what the bedroom would look like if it was in the publication Architectural Digest.

Follow these essential steps to declutter and depersonalize your primary bedroom:

• Remove personal items that broadcast your personality
• Place one item on the dresser and one on the nightstand
• Decorate the room in soft, soothing, neutral colors
• Create a cohesive flow from the primary bedroom to the ensuite bathroom by displaying white fluffy towels and placing a shower caddy under the sink to organize shampoos, toiletries, and other personal items so buyers can’t view them from the bedroom.

2. Skip eye-catching vignettes in bedrooms

Many people love eye-catching vignettes they see displayed in large living rooms and kitchens on HGTV. However, they’re not for the bedroom, according to Alden. If your primary room has a king bed in it, a vignette with two chairs and a table by the window can crowd the space and minimize the perceived square footage in an average sized bedroom.

Alden isn’t a big fan of vignettes when staging a bedroom because the majority of the houses she sells are an average bedroom size of 18 X 20. “You want to show as much space as you can and appeal to the masses,” explains Alden. Buyers might not appreciate the style of furniture or want a plaid fabric chair and a table by the bed or the window.

“You want to leave some space so buyers can imagine where they would put their own items so they say, ’Oh, gosh those two great leather chairs we have, we can put them right here in front of this window.’”