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6 Ways to Stage Your Home for Less Than $1,000 Staging a home for sale is all about making it inviting to the largest number of potential buyers. If a home is vacant, a stager will haul in furniture and décor so buyers can imagine themselves living there. If it’s occupied, the stager will declutter, neutralize and decorate for the masses.
Staging won't make a home sell for more than it’s worth. But it can set your home apart and boost the selling price to the top of the range for comparable homes. It can also cut the time on the market. Because nearly 90% of home buyers start their search on the Internet, staging is a good way to make sure online photos pop. Read the Full Article > Budget Home Updates Most homeowners have a room or two they'd like to overhaul, and when you're looking to sell, those must-do projects seem even more important. But while a major renovation might boost your home's value, does anyone really have the bottomless bank account to fund those big projects? The average staging budget is only 1 percent to 3 percent of your home's value -- hardly enough to finance those handmade hickory cabinets for your kitchen or marble mantle for your fireplace. "If you're getting ready to sell in the next few months, major renovations are probably not going to pay off," says staging expert Lori Matzke, owner of CenterStageHome.com. According to a report from Remodeling magazine, even a swanky $50,000 kitchen remodel will only earn back about 80 percent of its cost when you sell. A smarter bet? Stick to inexpensive upgrades that can make a huge difference in your home's saleability. These simple projects will get you the most bang for your buck. Read the Full Article > Service advises how to stage home before sale Richard and Barbara Purcell, 2925 Indiana Ave., recently decided to sell their home. They plan to put it on the market on Oct. 1. But before taking that next step they called in the help of Marcia Yockers of Stevens Point Home Staging & Organization, a service they discovered while paging through a magazine. Home Staging is a very new and growing trend and Yockers launched her business in January. "This is very unique to this area," Yockers said. "There are other stagers in Appleton and Marshfield, and larger cities generally have them." Read the Full Article > Eye Appeal is Buy Appeal in Real Estate Decorator Evelyn Truhn stands in a young lady's bedroom evaluating three teens in bikinis on a wall. The trio return her stare from a poster of the surfer movie "Blue Crush," but Truhn says it must go. "You’d expect it in a kid’s room," the Oceanside woman remarks, "but a poster with bikini-clad girls when you want to sell is not good." When Truhn decorates a house, she comes with an eye to strip it of most things personal -- from photos of loved ones lining a fireplace mantle to crayon drawings adorning a refrigerator – since depersonalizing is basic to her brand of decorating: home staging. While interior decorators design around an owner's lifestyle, stagers like Truhn design a seller's home to appeal broadly to potential buyers, inviting them to envision how they would live there. Toward this end, depersonalization is one principle that guides home stagers. Others include de-cluttering and creating more space. Read the Full Article > Best Markets for Buyers If you're searching for property in Tampa, luck is on your side. Too many listed homes and not enough buyers means you've got the upper hand. Want all-new appliances or $20,000 knocked off the asking price before you sign? Chances are, sellers there are willing to comply. The same can be said for Minneapolis and Kansas City. All three, like Tampa, currently benefit buyers, thanks to an overabundance of supply and low sales rate. Read the Full Article > Set the Stage: Boost your current home's resale potential Today, there are more existing homes on the market than just a year or two ago, so moving your home quickly may take a little more effort. We asked two top local stagers to help. Lori Matzke and Deanna Ryan shared with us their top ten tips for setting the stage to sell your home quickly and profitably! 1. Start at the Curb Read the Full Article > SELL THIS HOUSE Join Lawrence and Suzanne Taylor on a tour of their about-to-be-listed house to find out what it's going to take to sell - and pick up a few tips that might help you when it's your turn. Super Bowl Sunday is the unofficial kickoff to the spring real estate market, and Lawrence and Suzanne Taylor want to make sure that their house in St. Paul's Mac-Groveland neighborhood sells quickly. So we asked local real estate experts for advice on how to make a quick sale. Barb Brin, Coldwell Banker Burnet's No. 1 sales agent for 2004 and 2005, says that the most important thing is pricing it right, but she also knows the importance of getting the house in tip-top shape. Read the Full Article > Home Staging Newspaper Columnist Lori Matzke calls herself "A Domestic Fitness Guru." She's a Home Staging Expert who wants the public to know how to make their homes sell faster -- and for more money. And she wants to make it all very easy. "I hear these horror stories about staging experts who go into homes, have the owners move out to a motel, bring in a huge crew, and then work round the clock for two or three days, hauling in outside store furniture -- all at the homeowner's expense -- and I just cringe," says the outspoken Minnesota native, who recently staged a house for the front cover of the national publication Realtor Magazine. "People with homes on the market are already busy and harried. That's why I teach them how to stage their places in a matter of hours -- usually two to four hours -- using what furniture is already on hand." In addition to her national workshops, Matzke has come out with a new book, called Home Staging: Creating Buyer-Friendly Rooms to Sell Your House, which takes the mystery out of home staging. Read the Full Article > Home Staging Home staging isn't interior design -- and it's not home decorating. It’s when you put your home's best features forward to create a buyer-friendly environment. If you're preparing your home for sale, you should realize that once it's on the market, it's no longer your home. It's a product. And selling your home is all about first impressions. Potential buyers usually take about 10 to 15 minutes, tops, to walk through a home and decide whether they like it or not. Observe your home from their point of view to realistically understand what it is they are actually seeing -- then make the necessary transformations. All it takes is a game plan, some creativity, a jar of elbow grease, and the strong desire to show off your home in order to sell it quickly for the highest profit. Read the Full Article > Setting the stage for a sale Twenty years ago, professional real estate stager Judy Kincaid started telling friends what they needed to do to sell their homes. Rip out that old carpet, she said. Corral the clutter. Clean out the closets. "People don't always want to know what's wrong with their homes - you have to learn to be very diplomatic," she explained in a kindly but firm tone. Read the Full Article > Make Any Room Look Bigger Your new listing has a very small living room, bathrooms, or kitchen. What do you do? Just because you’re given small spaces to work with in preparing a home for market doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with them. You can easily make any room look larger or more attractive, according to designers and home stagers who have developed strategies to show off the best features of every room in a house. Read the Full Article > Ask the Expert: Tips on successfully showing your home Q: How do I effectively ''show'' my home? A: Showing your home is a lot like a first date: You get your house all gussied up, put the prettiest face possible on the property and try to impress the heck out of someone you barely know - the potential buyer. But showing a home does not have to be overwhelming or costly. Regardless of your home's size, age, style and location, there are ways to spruce it up and effectively showcase its assets. So grab your paintbrush, carpet cleaner, lawn mower and Lysol - the four ingredients to a great first date - and get to work on your house. Read the Full Article > Sprucing up for spring When Tom and Marian McDevitt decided to sell their 10-year-old house in Lakeville and move to a maintenance-free condo, they did a little sprucing up. They touched up the exterior paint, cleared out some of the clutter and cleaned. But that wasn't good enough for many prospective buyers. "They wanted us to carpet and redo this and redo that, but if you redid everything they wanted to do, it would have cost a bloody fortune," Marian McDevitt said. After six unsuccessful months, the McDevitts ended up taking the house off the market and are relisting it this spring. Welcome to the spring market. With the inventory of houses for sale on the rise, selling your house is going to take even more time, more patience and more elbow grease. Read the Full Article > Staged to sell
You're selling your home. You've fixed the leaky roof, replaced the cracked window and done some general sprucing up. As the prime home-selling season approaches, you think you're ready for potential buyers. Think again. Your home can make a better impression on visitors if you use some home-staging techniques. The result can be higher bids and quicker sales. Mardi Bagley, a Duluth Realtor, suggests sellers walk through their house as if they're guests walking in for the first time. "You see things you wouldn't before, such as the carpet needs cleaning or the wallpaper is out of date," said Bagley of the Edmunds Co. "Basically, spruce up, paint up and fix up anything broken. Do it before you put it on the market." Read the Full Article >
What is "Home Staging" and How Does it Help Sell My House? "Home staging" is not a new term, but for many homeowners and real estate agents the concept of "professional home staging" is shedding new light on how to promote a home in the real estate marketplace. In past years, homeowners were left to their own discretion as far as preparing for home showings. Though they could occasionally rely on an agent for instructions, more often than not real estate agents were just as perplexed at working out the details as the homeowner. While agents are experts in the field of selling and closing, many are not design savvy. Agents usually know exactly what factors can help sell a home. It’s just not always easy to get a home into selling condition in a timely manner without some sort of experienced assistance. Read the Full Article > Home staging eliminates clutter, helps homes sell When Lori Matzke was called in to help figure out why a half-million dollar house in the Minneapolis area wasn't selling, she figured the stuffed deer head above the urinal might have had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the stuffed prairie chickens around the whirlpool bath. "Most people are going to look at that as a very scary, freaky thing," she said. "And that's what they're going to remember about your house." As a house stager, Matzke's job is to help sellers get rid of all things they won't want a buyer to remember about their houses, like the birthing pool - full of water - that recent clients had sitting in front of their living-room picture window. Read the Full Article > |
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