Marketing Your Wintertime Listing

If you’re preparing to sell your home this winter, you’ll want to take a somewhat different approach to staging the home and presenting it to potential buyers. After all, there’s a difference between asking someone to visit and view a home on a cheerful spring weekend instead of a gloomy winter day. You’ll need an agent to help offer a bit of extra incentive in the form of beautiful spaces, flattering photos, and exciting marketing collateral to make your wintertime listing stand out and draw in buyers and their agents.

Staging a listing in the cold of winter is all about using the season to showcase the warmth of the home. A home shown during the winter should feel like a welcome retreat, offering a glowing, toasty, and welcoming atmosphere when homebuyers enter.

In order to get your listing winter-ready, appeal to all of the senses as buyers and agents come in the door:

Touch

Trade out standard throw pillows for heavier textures like wool, cable knit, fur, and leather. Add a plush blanket along sofa arms and chair backs. Trade light, sheer curtains for heavier drapery material.

Sight

Add accessories made of warm woods and glowing metals like copper or rose gold instead of silver and chrome. These can help create an inviting glow and a sense of warmth throughout the space.

Sound

Of course, a crackling fire makes a wonderful soundscape for a winter listing. If the home doesn’t have a fireplace, consider burning some wood wick candles, which give off a similar sound. Play music in the background that offers the warmth of nostalgia, with retro classics from the 40s and 50s.

Smell

Fill the home with the aromas associated with wintertime, including spicy cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla. If you’re not a chef, put a pan of water in the oven at 200° and add apple slices, orange peels, and pumpkin pie spice to mimic the smell of apple pie baking.

How Hygge can transform your winter listing

Hygge has become a popular trend in both home decor and lifestyles over the last couple of years. Imported from Danish and Norwegian cultures, hygge refers to a focus on coziness and simplicity in order to add more warmth to everyday life—especially during the long, cold winter.

A focus on finding the hygge in your home might involve any of the following strategies:

• Think of rooms in terms of the way they promote relationships and interaction. Emphasize the ways that people can come together and enjoy conversations, meals, and activities in the home.

• Candles are a huge design feature in hygge Curate a beautiful collection of candles and place an emphasis on warm ambient lighting to mimic the glow of candlelight.

• Minimalism doesn’t have to be cold. When applied to hygge, it means simplicity and a lack of clutter in the home. I will work with sellers to declutter the home for a restful, serene space. Use luxe textures in design elements to add warmth while keeping the color palette simple and soothing.

• Create a hygge nook with a plush, comfy chair, throw blanket, candle, lamp, and books. Allow buyers to picture themselves in this soothing setting at the beginning or end of each day.

• If your home has a fireplace, make use of it in showings, either by lighting a fire or by bringing in candles and greenery to draw attention to this cozy design feature.

Make sure that photos are beautifully lit and reveal the home’s most desirable features. Open curtains, blinds, and shutters to let in as much natural light as possible. While you’ll want to show outdoor spaces, try to warm them up with extra pillows, blankets, and a fire bowl or fire pit. If there’s an outdoor fireplace, light it for the photos.

To learn more about preparing your home to sell, contact me and I will send you resources, tips, strategies and other helpful information to get started!

*article adapted from Reminder Media