Archive for the ‘Staged to Sell’ Category

In Las Vegas, where thousands of empty homes await buyers, many real estate practitioners are turning to professional stagers to prepare homes for sale and potentially generate more offers. But now there adapting a human twist.

Beyond just highlighting décor, some staging companies find house sitters, who pay anywhere from 25 percent to 50 percent of the monthly mortgage payment in exchange for temporary housing.

The presumption is that an occupied home is more likely to generate offers than a vacant property, say real estate professionals.

The staging company covers the costs of relocating the sitter, who must undergo criminal background checks and cannot smoke or have pets.

Source: KTNV 13 Las Vegas (07/05/2008)

Forget about overhauling the kitchen or redoing the bathroom. The fix-ups that pay off the most are often the simpler and more mundane, says Diane Saatchi, senior vice president at the Corcoran Group in New York.

Her specialty is selling high-end properties in the Hamptons. She recommends that sellers focus their improvements on small exterior changes rather than big-ticket projects inside the home. “Make the outside of the house look really great so that people fall in love between getting out of the car and the front door,” Saatchi says.

That includes repainting the trim and adding new hardware, manicuring trees and shrubs, replacing old siding and replacing windows that aren’t energy efficient.

Nationally, returns for all major home-improvement projects are fetching 70 cents on the dollar, according to a Remodeling magazine’s survey of real-estate professionals conducted late last year. That’s down from 80 cents in 2004.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, M.P. McQueen (05/15/2008)

Forget about overhauling the kitchen or redoing the bathroom. The fix-ups that pay off the most are often the simpler and more mundane, says Diane Saatchi, senior vice president at the Corcoran Group in New York.

Her specialty is selling high-end properties in the Hamptons. She recommends that sellers focus their improvements on small exterior changes rather than big-ticket projects inside the home. “Make the outside of the house look really great so that people fall in love between getting out of the car and the front door,” Saatchi says.

That includes repainting the trim and adding new hardware, manicuring trees and shrubs, replacing old siding and replacing windows that aren’t energy efficient.

Nationally, returns for all major home-improvement projects are fetching 70 cents on the dollar, according to a Remodeling magazine’s survey of real-estate professionals conducted late last year. That’s down from 80 cents in 2004.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, M.P. McQueen (05/15/2008)

In a tough sales market, staging can help move a property.

Barb Schwarz, who claims to have invented home staging in the early 1970s, estimates that about one in four homes nationwide are now staged.

Julie Dana and Marcia Layton Turn state in their book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Staging Your Home to Sell, that a seller stands to gain as much as $9,000 on a $200,000 house if it’s staged.

Shelly Wagner, a Detroit-based stager, estimates that the cost per room for staging is $100 – small potatoes if it really helps a home sell.

Here are some ideas from Wagner for effective, low-cost staging:

• Remove scatter rugs and knickknacks from every room.

• Get rid of everything on the kitchen counters, including appliances, except for the coffee maker.

• Remove as much as you can from closets.

• Hire a cleaning service if necessary to make the house spotless. Scrub floors, walls, and windows. Pay special attention to the microwave, oven, and refrigerator.

• Focus on the feature rooms, the living, dining, and master bedrooms. Additional bedrooms are best left empty or minimally furnished.

• Arrange the furniture to show off each room’s best features.

• Set the dining-room table with napkins, plates, and flatware.

• When showing the house, turn on soft instrumental “buying” music, preferably classical or jazz.

Source: Detroit News, Marge Colborn (05/03/08)

By Andy Capelluto

RISMEDIA, Nov. 14, 2007-Today’s consumers are looking to their agent more than ever to assist them in identifying ways to make their home sell faster. As a result, agents across the country are turning to home staging as a solution to help better position a home for sale.

Home staging is the process of glamorizing the look of any home by presenting it in an optimal light with the goal of maximizing the price and minimizing the number of days on the market. It’s a tool that is all about turning the lived-in house into a home that is ready to sell-a process that sellers generally aren’t equipped to do themselves.

According to a USA Today article, a major residential brokerage company looked at nearly 2,800 properties in eight different cities and found that staged houses sold in almost half the time it took the non-staged houses. They also discovered that sellers of staged homes, on average, received a substantially higher price at the end of the day. Similarly, a 2003 HomeGain survey of 2,000 real estate agents nationwide found that moderately priced home improvements made before the sale-ranging from $80-$2,800-ended up producing the highest return on investment at the time of the sale.
Agents that offer staging as a value-added service for their clients have also noticed an increase in the number of referrals they’re receiving from satisfied clients. As the real estate market gets more and more competitive this added benefit takes on more and more value. Today’s sellers are hearing more about home staging every time they turn on their television and are beginning to look to their real estate professional for direction.

Historically, agents have provided sellers with tips on ways to prepare the home for sale, like getting rid of the clutter and eliminating odors. However, home staging takes this process to a whole different level. Think of the many theatrical stages that have been set by stagehands for major media productions. Their job is to establish an impression-to set a scene that captures the viewer’s attention. Essentially, the effective “home stager” is faced with exactly the same challenge. While his or her job isn’t transforming a blank stage, it may even be more complex in transforming a “well lived in” home into one that is ready to sell. It needs to be made to look inviting, warm and cozy while offering the prospective buyers the ability to visualize themselves living there.

The first impression of any home is the key factor in selling that home. Most people are visually oriented and can’t easily remodel, repaint or create a feeling of “home” in their minds. So what the buyer sees more often than not is what they want to see. That’s reason enough to ensure that the home is presented in the best possible light. The old adage is still true-you never get a second chance at a first impression.

Home staging requires knowledge about interior decorating, the color wheel, the principles of design, components of composition, symmetry and asymmetry, etc., which to some comes naturally and to others, is a skill that can be acquired by training. There are a number of courses for agents to take to become more proficient in home staging such as Accredited Staging Professional (ASP) and Accredited Home-Staging Specialist (AHS). The AHS course is now available online.

Andy Capelluto is the author of The Power of Staging.

For more information, please visit www.StagingSpecialist.com.