| ENTER STAGE RIGHT |
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| Preparing your home for a quicker sale
through Home Staging |
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By Beryn Hammil - http://www.bhammil.com
Prospective home buyers make their buying decisions within
five seconds of walking into a house. Fact or fiction?
"It takes just a few seconds for a prospective buyer to
get an impression and know whether they want to buy your
house or not," says Susan Bowman, a real estate agent
with Kent Associates in Marin County.
So, when you're getting your home ready to sell, what
can you do to encourage a quick yes?
Home staging is the secret weapon of real estate agents
and their savvy clients. And staging sometimes results
in several prospective buyers saying yes. When that happens,
there's no telling how much over your asking price you'll
get when a bidding war starts.
While staging is certainly about clearing the clutter
and rearranging the furniture -- the stuff that distracts
the eye -- it also can include painting, carpeting, landscaping
and redecorating. And in the extreme case or for a new
house, home staging can be decorating from scratch, and
quickly. Whatever the degree of staging you do, it can
make a significant difference in how quickly and for how
much your home sells.
Does it make much difference? Just ask John and Carol
Sauer. Their Mill Valley house hadn't been redecorated
since they moved into it 13 years earlier. Last fall,
they put it on the market, but it didn't sell. They took
it off the market for the holiday season and at the beginning
of the year became serious about selling. Their real estate
agent, Jane Richmond of Pacific Union, strongly encouraged
them to stage the house because it would show better.
"It needed more than just taking stuff off the
dressers," Richmond says. "There was a definite '70s feeling
to the place that could be easily updated with the right
approach."
Staging makes a house appeal to the widest possible range
of people. Prospective buyers want to imagine themselves,
not you, living in the house. That means putting away
personal items.
"When you stage your house, you have to realize
that it's not your home anymore," John Sauer says. Richmond
brought in a professional stager for a consultation. The
stager suggested the house needed recarpeting, repainting
in places, rearranging of some furniture and, for the
family room, a key selling feature in any house, complete
refurnishing.
With that in mind, the Sauers sorted through their personal
items, determining which to keep and which to give away
or toss. They packed what they kept.
Then the staging work began.
The '70s feeling came from the natural wood trim on all
the windows and doors. This was dramatically changed simply
by painting it all white. The walls, which were light
beige, were in good condition and left alone.
All the carpeting in the bedrooms and halls was replaced,
giving the house a fresher, more updated appearance. The
furniture was simply rearranged to appear more inviting,
except in the well-loved family room, which was completely
overhauled with new furniture, plants and accessories.
The house was put back on the market for more than the
previous asking price. The Sauers immediately got five
offers. Their house sold within the first week for far
more than the new asking price. The time and money the
Sauers invested in preparing the house was realized many
times over in the price they got.
"What helped us was the initial meeting. We got
ideas about what should be changed and how it would look,"
Sauer says. "We also realized that the professional stager
should be given as much autonomy as possible for this
process to work well." This is because stagers are not
emotionally attached to the house or its furnishings,
and they know what feeling the buyer is looking for when
walking in the door.
How do you know whether your home is a good candidate
for staging?
Put yourself in the place of a prospective home buyer.
Walk through your front door as if you've never been in
the house. Look hard. Be objective. Get past the familiar
feeling of coming home. What do you see, and how do you
feel? If you can't be objective, recruit a close friend
to be honest, not polite.
If the feeling is chaos jumping out at you, your house
is definitely a good candidate for staging.
Some basic things can help make a house show well. Clear
the clutter. Take everything off the dresser, the mantle,
the refrigerator door, the kitchen and bathroom counters.
Everything. After you've thoroughly cleaned all the surfaces,
put just a few nice pieces back. A stager's trick is to
add three interesting pieces, grouped together rather
than spread out. This creates visual appeal.
Sort, toss or store neatly all that stuff in the closets,
cabinets, shelves and storage areas. There are companies
that help people sort through years of accumulation so
this burdensome chore can be lifted from your shoulders.
Clean. A clean, neat house always shows better than one
where dust bunnies lurk in corners and beds are unmade.
For more basics see "Staging Tips" on this page.
Sometimes staging your home is too much to handle; the
furniture's too old, there's no one to give you honest
answers about whether your house looks great or you have
to move before the house sells and you can't leave everything
behind until it does. Then what do you do?
Bring in a professional stager -- someone with a trained
eye, a warehouse full of designer furniture, accessories
to die for and thriving plants.
Watching a stager is like watching a magician. A stager
can move a sofa from one side of the room to another and
completely change the feeling and focus in that space.
A stager offers not only a fresh perspective, but an understanding
of why a change is important. They also bring with them
a Rolodex full of resources to get the necessary work
done quickly.
Typically, the real estate agent decides the overall impression
the house should convey to the buyer, then calls in the
stager. The stager comes into the house and takes notes.
They look at how traffic flows in a space and how to highlight
the good architectural focal points and minimize the awkward
ones. They think about what furniture style will best
suit the house and provide the most appeal to prospective
buyers.
If the owner's furniture will be left in the house, they
recommend what to remove and what to bring to enhance
what's there. Depending on how much preparation is necessary,
recommendations may include remodeling old bathrooms,
replacing appliances, painting, carpeting and landscaping.
As with the Sauers, this work is done first.
If it's a large staging project, it's not uncommon to
see a stager arrive with several trucks filled with furniture,
bolts of fabric, boxes of accessories and tall, dramatic
plants. An installation can take from a couple of days
to a week, depending on the size of the house and the
scope of work.
Some stagers have warehouses full of furniture, others
rely on suppliers who work exclusively with professional
stagers, and others rent pieces from large, national furniture
rental companies.
Almost all stagers have their own inventory of accessories,
the stock-in-trade items that they've collected. This
inventory is usually quite large, covers a lot of different
decorating styles and creates the ultimate look of a room.
Some stagers rent accessories from showrooms and stores.
And art dealers often lend or rent pieces to give their
artists exposure.
As a final touch, stagers add those wonderful large, healthy
plants. Most of the time they're real plants and have
to be professionally maintained. This is included in the
staging package.
There are as many prices to staging as there are stagers
in the business. And, like buying a car, the price depends
on the style in which you want to arrive.
Often the real estate agent pays for the initial consultation
because a lot can be accomplished in that meeting. Also,
the stager can say things to the homeowner that the agent
might feel awkward about saying, since the agent has a
longer- term relationship with the seller.
A one-hour consultation gets ideas on the table about
the scope of the project and the time line necessary to
get all the work done. Typically a consultation of this
nature is included in the price of the staging, but if
it's a small project and the homeowner will do most of
the work, this meeting might cost from $100 to $400, depending
on its length.
A basic staging involving some furniture rearrangments,
the use of some accessories and plants, and about a day's
work costs around $2,000 at the low end. The price of
a full empty-house staging, on the other hand, has been
known to cost as much as $30,000. But this represented
a fraction of the asking price for a house listed at several
million dollars. The house sold the first day it was shown
to brokers for $1 million over the asking price.
The Sauers spent $25,000 to prepare their home for sale.
The selling price of their home increased by more than
10 times that amount. "The price we got was 30 percent
more than an offer which fell through five months earlier,"
John Sauer says -- not an insignificant return on their
staging investment. Whatever level of staging you do,
it will make a noticeable difference in your favor.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright
owner. |
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