Home Staging Worth the Money, Effort? Yes.

Nearly every home seller hopes to get their property sold quickly and at top dollar.

Staging may be just the thing to help in that quest, according to the National Association of REALTORS’^® 2017 Profile of Home Staging (http://bit.ly/2tGmtXe).

Using things like furniture, color, lighting, and accent pieces, professional stagers transform for-sale homes from ho-hum to oh-ah and work to make a property appeal to the largest number of prospective buyers

And their work has an impact: 39 percent of sellers’ agents said that staging a home greatly decreases the amount of time the home is on the market, according to NAR’s report.

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

Additional findings include:

• The most commonly staged spaces include the living room (83 percent), kitchen (76 percent), master bedroom (69 percent), and dining room (66 percent).
• Staging the living room was found to be most important to buyers (55 percent), followed by staging the master bedroom (51%), and the kitchen (41 percent).
• Seventy-seven percent of buyers’ agents said staging a home made it easier for buyers to visualize a property as a future home.

Calculating Retirement Expenses

No matter how much you read about financial and retirement planning, it’s hard to get a grip on just what your expenses will be in retirement.

If you’re about to retire and want to get a feel for all the true costs of retirement living in a specific place, look at the Economic Security Database http://bit.ly/1m8SUYb  and the Elder Economic Security Standard™ Index (http://bit.ly/2tb8Q5B).

You can choose a city and county and see the costs associated with housing, health care, transportation, and food for that location and the income required to meet your basic needs.

The tool also could be useful if you’re considering multiple retirement spots and want to compare living costs in different cities.

For more tips on real estate, aging-in-place, and not outliving your money, request a copy of our free book, The Northwest Indiana Guide for Seniors.

Posted with permission from sres.org Consumer Newsletter-August 2017 by Elyse Umlauf-Garneau