| URBAN LIVING |
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| Clutter Busters Set the Stage for Selling
People's Homes |
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By Angela Murrills
Erasing what you consider to be the comfy “personality”
of your home may not be a bad idea at selling time, as
these before-and-after images prove.
There's only one time I could ever imagine allowing John
Carter past the front door of our eccentrically furnished,
colourfully decorated, and undeniably cluttered house.
And that's when we sell it. Because what Carter and his
colleagues at DEKORA do, using their various backgrounds
in set design and marketing, is change your home around
so it finds a new owner as quickly as possible. The idea
of living on a movie or TV set seems a bit Stepford homeish,
but then I remember open houses and being immediately
turned off by grid-system shelving, empty bookshelves,
and scary Spanish Provincial coffee tables. Maybe he has
a point.
The technical term for the transformations wrought by
this West Vancouverbased year-old company is home staging.
"You can embrace it or ignore it," says Carter
over coffee at White Spot, "it" being the first,
vital impression that your place makes on potential buyers.
"The downfall of ignoring it is a slower sale or
lower price," he says. A 1999 study done by Coldwell
Banker Realty in California reported that staged homes
in the Los Altos area sold more quickly and for higher
prices than unstaged homes. Carter cites one Tsawwassen
house that sat on the market for two years before some
astute rearrangement hooked a new owner.
The painful truth is that everything that gives your rooms
their personality--family snapshots, shelves jam-packed
with vintage finds, the dark green you agonized over in
the paint store--can be anathema to other people. Doesn't
it feel like slaughtering your firstborn to lose all that?
"The way you sell your house is not the way you live
in it," says Carter. Besides, you've already made
the emotional break, you're going to be packing stuff
anyway, and it's just a case of getting rid of that flaky
old sofa now instead of a month down the road.
DEKORA works directly with homeowners, with or without
their realtor present. (Realtors love home staging, no
prizes for guessing why.) A consultation is $95 an hour
(two to three hours is normal), which gets you a written
report suggesting, for instance: "Lampshades on existing
lamps should be replaced with new, un-pleated shades in
a natural linen or homespun fabric... If possible, take
the speakers down from the valances, and remove dog beds
and the like when showing the house." New paint is
a common recommendation. "We try to stick to neutral
palettes to appeal to as many people as possible,"
says Carter. DEKORA is not in the major-renovation business,
but it does organize minor cosmetic changes like replacing
scuffed Arborite counters with new ones (or Maxim with
Architectural Digest). The company can also provide a
free estimate with room-by-room pricing based on them
doing the work.
"We're totally up-front
and honest," he says. "We may even love the
way...[the owners have] decorated but it's not appropriate."
They may also point out that 15 years' worth of newspapers
and receipts lying around isn't appealing either. They
handle the flip side, too, when someone has already moved,
leaving bare rooms that need to be dressed with rented
furniture.
Carter turns on his laptop to show some case studies.
Here's a before shot of a 750-square-foot West Side apartment
with a funky old blue armchair heaped with cushions. It
looks personal and lived in...by someone else. "We're
taking the show-suite mentality," he says (as developers
do with brand-new buildings), which, in this apartment,
meant installing different furniture, including a smaller-scale
coffee table and wall mirror to give the impression of
more space.
Looking at more visuals emphasises the positive--or negative--impact
of ostensibly minor details. Replace that froufrou bedding
with crisp tailored linens in brown and off-white, as
DEKORA did for one client, and you have a setting that
looks cool and modern rather than Tammy Wynette wannabe.
A living-room after has less on the coffee table, colour
splashes via small crimson cushions, and a big fern in
the corner. The faux Vincent van Gogh over the fireplace
stayed (!), but overall the place looks cleaner and tidier.
Before: a whale-printed shower curtain, a tropical-fish-printed
bath mat, and hair products uncaged; after: reeds in a
glass vase, towels (white) neatly rolled in a wicker basket,
and a tasteful botanical-print shower curtain. It's as
anonymous as a hotel bathroom, but to the next possible
owner, this is a good thing. Carter compares home staging
to a job interview: "It's like putting a shirt and
tie on..."
Projects take from a few hours to five days and, ballparking
it, you're looking at $3,500 to $5,000 for a completely
redone and redecorated 750-square-foot apartment. Still,
this Extreme Makeover approach can definitely pay for
itself (info at www.dekora.com or 604-876-4355), and there
are tricks you can do yourself to make a place more salable.
"Edit and clean," says Carter. "If you
don't do anything else, do those." |
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