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De-Clutter, Pre-Pack, and Reflow - Part #1
From Florida Realtor magazine, September 2006 | page 22 | by Heidi Russell Rafferty | Illustration by Bonnie Lallky-Seibert
With a few tweaks and a little decluttering, you can showcase a listing and get top dollar. Here’s how.
The young family needed help selling their house. The task of transforming their home into a showcase property seemed monumental. After all, while their abode reflected charming memories, the toys, knickknacks—even the wall colors—bore telltale traces of small children and rambunctious family fun.
Laura Napoleon, a sales associate with Watson Realty in Lake Mary, plunged in with a Rambo-esque attack on the home’s style. Napoleon took a gamble. She then helped the homeowners pack and clean before listing the property. “I said, ‘We’ll blow it out. Let’s pack everything we can and put it in the garage,’” Napoleon says.
She and the family repainted the walls in neutral colors, rearranged furniture and packed up personal photos. “There was nothing on the desk or cabinets,” she says. They placed a couple of accessories in pertinent locations—on the mantel, for example. And a vase of fresh flowers strategically drew the eye to a sunny spot near French doors.
The result: “It looked and smelled beautiful, like a model [home],” Napoleon says. The next day, a caravan of 50 real estate sales associates came through, as well as four scheduled buyer appointments. By 10 a.m., Napoleon had six offers—four tangible contracts and two verbal. By noon, she had executed a contract for $20,000 over the asking price, which had been in the $400,000s.
Showcasing a home may seem like common sense, especially in the current market, where buyers rule. But many sales associates and their clients don’t understand the advantages, says Priscilla Stowe, co-owner of Style Sisters in Sarasota. Her firm, which she started last year with business partner, Susan Maggio, specializes in helping real estate professionals and homeowners get properties buyer-ready—whether they decide to totally revamp the property or just spruce it up.
Real estate professionals have been sprucing up homes and making suggestions for years, but it’s only in the last several years that the word staging has caught on. The concept’s originator is Barb Schwarz, president of Stagedhomes.com of San Francisco, who says she invented staging back in 1972.
Today, Schwarz holds the U.S. federally registered trademark on the word stage as it pertains to preparing homes for sale. She speaks often on the subject, and in 1998, she developed an Accredited Staging Professional (ASP) course. [For the purposes of this article, we’ll use the term showcasing.]
“[Sales associates] were afraid to tell sellers what to do with their homes for fear of insulting them, and many of them still are,” says Schwarz, who is also a real estate broker. “We all knew about the cat smell and the bad wallpaper, so everyone was very hungry for a way to alleviate those issues and sell the homes quickly, and at the right price.”
Sometimes showcasing can be as simple as removing personal photos and mementos, packing up some furniture to open up rooms, putting out some fresh flowers and doing a thorough cleaning. Other times, it means a complete overhaul, painting rooms, repairing tile, re-facing cabinets and even buying new furniture, rugs and accessories. However, before you spend money, consider your return on investment.
Experts says that expensive facelifts are best reserved for problematic homes or high-priced listings where the return on investment is substantial. However, most homes just need some elbow grease, a little imagination and some money to pay for supplies such as paint.
“The market has changed. There’s a higher inventory. The days when you’d throw a house on the market—and, boom, it would sell—are gone. There’s an increased need for the seller to justify the asking price,” Stowe says.
ere are some of the reasons showcasing is beneficial and some strategies to help your clients present pristine properties:
Continue to Part 2 of this Article
