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Stager helps owners make most of homes
By Kelly Pollard
TIMES CORRESPONDENT

A house is a product to be marketed, according to Kym Hough, a home stager based in Danville. Home stagers are more common in today's competitive real estate market.

Unlike in years past, homeowners can't expect multiple offers on homes they put on the market with little improvements.

Kym Hough has an eye for detail, whether cruising unique shops in San Francisco and New York City, or scanning the belongings spread about a disheveled house that has been on the market for months.

She can get that house sold, and usually for more than asking price. It's all in the presentation.

"If you don't stand out from the other houses on the market, buyers will move on to the next house," Hough said.

With over 20 years of experience in corporate marketing and design, Hough was ready for a fresh start when she moved to Danville four years ago.

A friend recommended she look into home staging. She was thrilled to use her skills as a marketer in a fresh, exciting way.

"Home staging is exactly what I've always done. I take a package and put it on the shelf to make it stand out from the competition."

Although not all home stagers are accredited, Hough completed an accreditation program through Staged Homes.

In the three-day course, she learned how to work with Realtors to sell homes fast and how to set up a business. In the four years she has worked as a stager, Hough has achieved prestige and is becoming an industry leader.

There are many levels of staging that Hough provides.

The minimal service is a home consultation in which she advises homeowners where to place their own belongings to make the most of the space.

More involved home staging relies on Hough's 16-foot box truck, stocked with a variety of towels, bedspreads, silk flowers. She also uses her warehouse in Oakland for couches, beds, and other large pieces of furniture.

"I address the needs of the individual client," Hough said. "From the vacant houses that are naked and cold to the homes that are furnished but just need some help."

Like many other service providers, Hough won't give a quote on a home staging until she walks through the home herself.

She takes pictures and ponders the possibilities, then comes back to the owners with a proposal.

Hough is also happy to help owners with more extensive renovations.

"We do project management, too, and work with landscapers, painters, handymen and carpet installers, which is more time consuming.

Most often, we can do a home staging in one day. We're efficient, which keeps the costs down for our clients."

Hough urges homeowners to call her before it is too late.

"Call the minute you decide you want to put the house on the market, before any renovations, painting, even clearing the clutter. I could use some of that clutter for you in your home."

Other common mistakes are painting the interior walls all white or plunking too much money into one area of a house, such as the kitchen, while neglecting to spruce up everything else.

Hough loves to guide clients through the process of renovation, showing them the power of painting accent walls, positioning a couch at a certain angle to bring light into the room, or even touching up paint on the trim outside the windows.

A lot of her ideas are inexpensive fixes that have a huge effect on market appeal. By the time Hough has finished staging a home, many clients find it hard to leave their homes. However, Hough offers yet another service for these clients.

"We also do staging to live. I can recommend how to place furniture and advise you on paint colors or flooring before you even move into your new home," Hough said. "You will love your house more than you have ever loved it by the time we are done."

Kelly Pollard is a freelance writer and mother of two. Reach her at kelpollard@sbcglobal.net.

The house above was staged by another stager and on the market for four months without an offer. The homeowner hired a new Realtor who brought in Kym Hough to re-do the staging, add a bit of color and furnishings and put it back on the market. It sold within the week with multiple offers. It's not enough to hire a stager - you must hire the right stager!

Hadda turned to a surprising source for help: the "home stager" she'd
hired earlier to strip the personality from her old home so it would be
more attractive to potential buyers.

It's not as strange as it sounds. Real estate agents often recommend
that sellers hire a home stager (also known as a real-estate enhancer)
to whisk through before they go on the market. When "staggering to
sell," a home stager, sometimes with the help of a team, stashes away
personal items (your collection of antique dolls, for example, or the
model boat on the mantel), repaints aggressively colored walls, and
rearranges furniture and accessories to draw attention to a home's
best features. "Staging to live," as it's called, is the logical next step.
Having come to appreciate the clean, uncluttered look the stager
achieved in their old homes, sellers are rehiring stagers to work the
same magic in their new home.  But this time, instead of seeking to
depersonalize your abode, the emphasis is on organizing, decluttering,
and rearranging to "de-stress" the environment, says Barb Schwarz,
who's been staging homes for more than 30 years and founded the
International Association of Home Staging Professionals four years
ago.

 "It's visual therapy," say Schwarz. "It's about fine-tuning a space
to improve its energy and the flow from room to room," she says.
Schwarz estimates that about 40 percent of her staging-to-sell clients
ask her to stage their new homes.

 Staging is also about getting rid of familiar objects that
homeowners are overly attached to, says interior designer Pat
McMillan, coauthor of Home Decorating for Dummies. A stager "can be
brutally honest" about disposing of clutter - and relegating tatty family
heirlooms to the closet. (Just be sure to rehang Aunt Irma's
needlepoint before her annual visit.)

 Traffic cop. Anyone can hang out a shingle in the rapidly growing
field, though a three-day course at one of Schwarz's Staging
University training programs, which covers such topics as traffic
patterns, furniture arrangement, and "family lifestyle," earns
graduates the right to call themselves Accredited Staging
Professionals.  Fees vary widely but typically run about $75.00 a hour.
 Depending on the number of rooms, the total fee to stage a home
may range anywhere from $750 to $3,000, says Schwarz.

Skeptics may scoff, but there are plenty of satisfied customers, like
Ilse Hadda. Confronted by those confounding bookshelves, she called
in KYM HOUGH, who had staged her old home before she sold it.
Hough moved the shelves to different parts of the house. She placed
two of them near windows in the living area and put the orphan
recliner in front of them with a small table and a lamp. Voilà, the nook
felt like a mini-library. Saying that a desk doesn't belong in a space
designed for rest, Hough relocated it to the guest bedroom. The whole
process took just a few hours.  "Now everything fits right in," says
Hadda.  "There was nothing she did that I didn't agree with in the
end." The prices was also right. Instead of cash, Hough accepted a
bed and a few bookshelves left over after the staging.  Of course,
most stagers don't take payment in kind. So what do you do with the
leftover stuff? Two words: yard sale.

Staging a sure bet to sell your house
Amy Wilson, The Orange County Register, as reprinted in the Contra Costa Times
02/15/2004

Let's be honest. It's a great house to start with. Vaulted ceilings with post-and-beam construction. Great tile, great carpet, great colors, great condition. Lots of light. Fourteen hundred square feet, but all of the square feet are cute, cute, cute. Big, big yard -- the lot is almost 9,000 square feet -- in a land of not-big yards. Four 75-year-old trees out front. A genuine rope swing hangs off one of them. A garage and a cool shed
sit to the side. The shed could be a playhouse or an office or a studio but is, right this minute, "The Man Room." It's full of winemaking stuff, a wine rack, a table full of cigars, a guitar leaned seductively against the wall, one chair, a serape on the floor and a picture of an authentic college crewing team.

So, yeah, this is a great house.

But -- how shall we put this? -- people live there. Have since 1948. This family since 1992. They have stuff. Lots of stuff in all the little crannies.
And, heaven help them, they want to sell. Because real estate is what it is, they have "a four-week window" to get it done so they can get their next great house.

They make the deal to buy a new one on a Saturday.

That very minute, the old house has to stop being their home. Or so Jim and Cathie Slaughter tell each other.

It's their investment now.

Which is hard if you had your only child there, and every room holds a memory.

Monday. They're talking to Michael Salas, a Coldwell Banker realtor, and he says, "Have you ever thought about staging?"

Jim and Cathie, being open-minded people, say: "What is staging?" Many home sellers paint the walls or tidy up. Home staging goes far beyond, revamping rooms and sometimes entire homes, inside and out, to highlight the best features of the home.

It's more than just redecorating.

It's crawling into the head of the potential home buyer and then clearing enough spaces so that they can see themselves and their possessions there. It is also the process of leaving/putting/rearranging enough of the right stuff in the house to ensure potential buyers that this house will welcome their lives into it.

Salas shows them some before-and-after photos of properties. He
cites an oft-quoted National Association of Realtors line: In 1999, a
California broker named Joy Valentine surveyed 2,772 homes in eight of the state's cities. She found that the average time on the market for staged homes was 13.9 days, while the average time on the market for nonstaged homes was 31 days.

Hot diggity, the Slaughters say.

Salas goes on. It seems sale prices for the nonstaged homes averaged 1.6 percent higher than list; staged homes sold at an average of 6.32 percent over list. For a home valued at $500,000, that would make a $31,600 difference.

The Slaughters want $749,000 for their house. They think they are already pushing the upper limit of the price ceiling.

Cathie reminds Jim about the time they were shopping for a house, and they came upon this charmer, but once inside, found hundreds of teddy bears perched everywhere. "I couldn't see past them," she said.

She and Jim say yes to staging, even though they have no stuffed-animal collection to hide.

"We thought of a stager," Cathie says, "as a personal trainer for our home."

Two days later, Lane Burton looks around the house. Burton has "staged" a lot of vacant homes. Buyers buy out of emotion, and empty walls evoke little of it. So he's brought in furniture and accessories, magazines and flowers and made the buying public believe in the house's potential.

This, like we said, is a house that is completely and totally occupied. It is the kind of house that nobody thinks needs a stager.

Burton begs to differ. He is gentle. He is complimentary. But, let's face it, he can say things to the owner that the Realtor can't.

Like? The front entrance needs verve. (Take up the grass, put down flagstone, put down coconut mulch.) The front door needs definition. (Paint, move plants.) The hallway is wasted. (Fix that.) The master bedroom needs to be rearranged. (Make a seating area, make more walking space between pieces.) The kitchen needs to be decluttered. (Take away appliances, stow the plethora of spices, hide stacks of dishes,
bring out the extensive pottery collection.) The flowerbeds need fresh buds (check), and the yard furniture could use some sprucing (check, check). Let's clean those carpets, let's power-wash the exterior, let's make the closet look like the racks at The Gap.

Three days after the initial consult, Burton stands in the master bedroom, directing the Slaughters and two burly men what to carry out, what to throw out, what to keep, what to store, what to give away, what to move, what to "merchandise."

He's created a Throw Out pile, a Goodwill pile, a Storage pile and a
Haggle-with-the-6-year-old-over pile.

Jim Slaughter, Newport Beach, Calif. lawyer, is still in his suit and piling on piles. The old shutters, the mildewed cooler, the dry Play-Doh in the Throw Out pile. The R25 attic insulation blanket and the patio furniture in the Goodwill pile. A few beautiful antiques, some lamps and the family photos go in storage. (You want the buyers to look at the architecture of the house, not the photographs.)

"I'm looking at this like a premove. We have to do it anyway," he says. "By the way, have you seen my Man Room?"

Seems Burton told Jim, a winemaker, to fix up the shed.

Jim, so pleased with the effect he's created, is thinking about a second career.

Accentuate the Positive When Preparing Your Home for Sale
By Connie Adair for the National Post


If TV’s Frasier Crane decided to move from his posh Seattle condo, the first thing he would have to do to prepare it for sale would be to put his father's battered green chair into storage, says real estate broker Marilyn Rothman of Marilyn RothmanReal Estate.

“Anyone who saw that apartment would only remember the chair. It’s important to de- emphasize what shouldn’t be there.”

That is just one of many tips homeowners may want to consider when preparing their home for sale. Heeding advice from real estate agents, interior designers and “stagers” (professionals trained to prepare houses for sale) help make the difference between a fast sale and one that drags on for weeks, and can also affect the bottom line, real estate agents say.

To prepare your house for sale, start by taking a walk to the curb, notebook in hand, then look at the house as though you were going to buy it yourself, says real estate agent Claire-Ann Rose of Chestnut Park Real Estate Ltd. “You are your own best critic.”

Make a list of jobs – repairs and improvements – that you think need to be done. Get your agent’s advice about which ones are worthwhile to undertake and which might be better to leave for the new owner.

“Your tile floor may be 20 years old and worn, but it’s probably not worth it toreplace the floor with tile. Potential purchasers may not like your choice, and 99% of buyers will want to change it to hardwood anyway,” Ms. Rose says.

Create a time frame in which to complete the work before listing the house for sale, and stick to it Ms. Rose says. “Be prepared to spend about 1% of the value of the house, whether the house is listed for $200,000 or $2-million.”

Fix minor flaws inside and out, says associate real estate broker Richard Ling of Harvey Kalles Real Estate Ltd. "When people notice a flaw, it’s human nature to wonder what else is wrong with the place.”

On the flipside to the battered-chair dilemma, art or furnishings that are unique or expensive should also be removed to ensure that they don’t draw too much attention at a showing, Ms. Rothman says.

Keep in mind, however, that some purchasers will imagine a “quality seller” when they see a nice piece of art, Ms. Rose says.

One of the most important jobs is to ensure your house is clean. “Don’t underestimate the importance of clean, whether a house is $300,000 or more than $1-million, Ms. Rothman says. “It’s hard to overcome a negative impression, and few people will buy if they are not suitably impressed by the exterior.”

It is a total package, so clean from the curb in, ensuring lawns are mowed, gardens are weeded and the exterior of the house looks good, she says.

“Fresh paint would be helpful. I think investing a couple of thousand to do this properly may provide a good return on investment. It could make your house more appealing, with the prospect of choosing your home over competing ones,” Mr. Ling says.

If interior walls look worse for wear, you might decide to repaint, but the experts suggest sticking to neutral colours that will appeal to the broadest number of people. Colour is emotional, and if someone does not like a shade, it can become an insurmountable barrier to a sale.

Ensure appliances are clean and working properly. Clean the carpets and windows. Replace burned out light bulbs, the leave the lights on inside and out, especially at night. “People walking by will be drawn to the house.” Ms. Rose says.

Eliminate offensive odours, such as stale tobacco smoke, pet smells, mildew and cooking odours. Ventilate rather than mask odours with air fresheners, Mr. Ling says. If you have pets, “put them in the spa for a few days so they won’t be upset,” Ms. Rose suggests. Frasier’s dog Eddie, and Frasier’s father for that matter, would be happier away from a parade of potential purchasers. With pets out of the house, your real estate agent will be able to show your house at any time. Pets can distract potential purchasers and turn off people who do not like animals or have allergies.

After you clear the cobwebs, clear the clutter. Remove personalized items so purchasers can concentrate on the size of the residence, Ms. Rothman says.

Spaces look bigger when there is less clutter. If you are selling an empty home, however, renting some furnishings and accessories can help make the house look more welcoming, Mr. Ling says. Remove small and precious items, such as jewellery and cash, sentimental pieces and expensive breakables.

For those who prefer to leave these worries to professionals, help is available. Stagers can prepare your house for you. Even if your home is in tip-top condition, a stager’s hand can often help the sale.

“In a slow market, staged homes sell faster and in a hot market, they sell for more money,” says Christine Rae at StagedHomes.com in St. Catherine’s, Ont.

Preparing a home for sale can take as little as one or two hours for a consultation, but the average time is about six hours, says interior designer Karyn Elliott of CRAZY HOUSE Home Staging in Calgary.

“We treat the house as a product on the market, not as a home that present owners live in,” she says.

“I study highly saleable features of the home and work to highlight these areas and de- emphasize any limitations,” Ms. Elliott says. She also looks at traffic paths, rearranges furniture and arranges painting or redecorating as necessary.

“I try to instill as many feelings of home as possible," she says.

“Homes have aromatic burning candles, fluffy towels and mounds of pillows on the bed to create strong and memorable feelings that touch all the senses.”

Fees can vary greatly, but most work on a flat fee for consultations and an hourly fee for other work. Ms. Rae notes, however, that staging an average house can cost less than the price of an advertisement.

Is it worthwhile to hire an accredited staging professional? Ms. Rose says her experience is that stagers can help increase the sale price of a home by 10% to 15%.

Whether you do it yourself, or have someone do the sprucing up for you, the key is to help purchasers make a faster decision by ensuring there are fewer things they will object to Ms. Rothman says. “The idea is to present you home in the best possible way.”

GETTING YOUR HOME SOLD IN A SLOW MARKET!
Be too good to pass up...
- Terrylynn Fisher, Realtor

You know, any licensed Realtor can list a property for sale. That is obvious, there are multiple signs on many street corners these days. Why do some sell and others sit unsold. What are Realtors and Sellers doing that are getting their homes SOLD? There are "tools of the trade" for agents to discuss with their sellers to decide if they fit in the marketing plan for their home when it goes on the market.

This is a list of some of them:

PRICE TO SELL - Price your home at or under the competition. In a declining market you want to price your home to be attractive today. Don't play the game of seeing what happens... If the market is dropping 1% per month for example and you play that game, you'll have to drop next month 2% or you'll be behind the market. You'll be doing what we call "chasing the market down" instead of "pacing the market"... I have seen multiple offers on aggressively priced properties that then sell over their list price and that is because in the eyes of the buyer, it was too good to pass up, even in this market. Price right and be too good to pass up. The longer a home sits on the market the lower the offer price proportionate to list price. Buyers think you'll be more negotiable after 30 or 45 days than earlier on in the listing period.

STAGE TO SELL - If I were to tell you there are two things that if you do them will virtually guarantee your home will sell, would you do them?Well if you need to sell, you'd be wise to do both prior to putting your home on the market. One is price and the other is staging. Stage your home. As Kym Hough of Staged to Sell always says, "It's all about the packaging." Remember that to sell your car for top dollar you would shine the windows and tires, wash the car, clean the inside and have it smelling and looking good. Why not invest at least that in what may be your largest investment in a lifetime? Staging is not decorating!!! It is maximizing your home's potential to the largest audience of potential buyers. The more exposure and appeal to the widest audience, the more chance of a sale and at a higher price than an unstaged home. Staged homes are clean, look appropriate for their arrangement, (meaning a dining room is a dining room not an office) and are "showcased" much like a builder does for their models. Builders wouldn't invest in staging their models if there was no return. Stage with a professional stager and be too good to pass up.

CREDITS FOR CLOSING COSTS - Many new home subdivisions on the market now are offering up to 6 months with no payments, $50,000 incentives for upgrades and closing costs, premium lots at reduced rates, etc... Again, builders wouldn't invest in incentives if they didn't work. Compete with incentives.

Why do you see sold prices that sometimes are higher than list price? Often it is not a multiple offer situation like the pricing example above, it is because the buyers and sellers have negotiated a higher price so the buyers can finance some of their closing costs and/or improvements. For example. If a property is priced at $400,000 and the buyer offers $390,000 with a $10,000 credit for non-recurring closing costs, the seller may counter back at full price with the $10,000 credit ($410,000) or add $5,000 ($405,000) on the price and split the financing of the closing costs for the buyer. Or somewhere in between if the property is overpriced for the market to start with. Some sellers that are aggressively priced might be able to counter the offer with a little over asking price and give back the credit to the buyer. The buyer has $10,000 less to come up with and is in essence financing the closing costs. That is often easier than finding another $10,000 to purchase with. Many buyers who are short on cash are qualifying based on their credit and income with this method of limiting their closing costs.

In the last few years of the boom, this would not have been possible as sellers didn't have to offer incentives or negotiate. That was then, this is now. Deal with the market you are in... By the way, lenders will allow up to 6% credit for buyer's closing costs. If the non-recurring closing costs do not reach that amount you do not generally get the balance of the credit. Offer credit for buyer closing costs and be too good to pass up.

CREDIT FOR BUYER 2/1 BUYDOWN - Offer money for the buyers financing. As interest rates increase, there are fewer buyers who can qualify for your price range... To increase the number of buyers you either have to lower the price or offer incentives that reduce their payments or increase their ability to qualify. One way to do that is to offer money for the buyer to buy down the interest rate. Called a 2/1 buydown, the approximate 2.75-3 points additional loan fee (2.75 to 3% of the loan amount) will buy down the interest rate the 1st year by 2 percentage points and the 2nd year by 1 percentage point, the third year being at the note rate at the time of taking out the loan. Right now that would be 6.125% note rate but qualifying the buyer at the 4.125% first year rate and the second year rate of 5.125% kicks in for one year followed the third year by the note rate of 6.125% for the balance of the 30 years. The best part of this loan option is that the rate is a FIXED rate, that was just bought down and will not ever adjust above that fixed rate of 6.125% . Offer points for the buyer's 2/1 buydown and be too good to pass up.

BOATS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES (TRIPS) - Does anyone really buy a home because the seller offers a trip to Hawaii or a new car? Well if the house isn't in their price range and just isn't the right home for them, no. But again, selling your home is about MARKETING. This marketing technique will call attention to your home. It is a numbers game. The more people through your home, the more likely someone will fall in love. The incentive is designed to bring more people through. Offer perks for the buyer and/or agents and be too good to pass up.

PAY REALISTIC COMMISSIONS - Remember getting your home shown by the most potential buyers starts in most cases with the Realtor who is selecting what their buyers see. They run a list of potential properties for the buyer to view. Within that range, the Realtor may have 120 or more homes available. They are going to show 10 to 30 or more over the course of a couple of weeks. That's 80 or 90 homes that might not get viewed by the buyer. If you want your home to be one of those shown, sometimes the commission is incentive to put you on the "show" list. We all KNOW a buyer isn't going to buy your home if it is not right for them, but being a marketing and numbers game... The more people who see your home, the more likely someone will fall in love with it. Remember the Realtor can work for weeks or months showing a buyer homes and then months for the escrow period and the Realtor doesn't get paid unless they write the offer on a property for that buyer. Sellers who are in sales understand this concept. Increase realtor incentives and be too good to pass up.

There are other ideas that make a difference too, Realtors do broker tours for other Realtors. That Realtor won't have to preview your property to see if it is right for their buyer as they'll have already been in it. It saves them time and makes it more likely your home will be shown if they have someone today or in a few weeks in your price range.

Open houses with purpose and incentives, root beer floats in the summer (outside of course), balloons on signs, invitations to neighbors for early viewings, lottery tickets for viewing homes you list, limousine tours, and more... Pick a Realtor that is creative and understands marketing. Then take these things into consideration when doing your marketing plan and understand that the Realtor you choose will have more success for you if they have the ability to pay for the marketing needed to get your home out there in all mediums. They need advertising in print, magazines for open houses. They need a strong internet presence through their company, your address (http://www.LasQuebradas.com) websites and all of the Multiple Listing and Realtor.com websites and features that promote your home. The internet background stuff to get the exposure for websites is expensive and necessary for a strong marketing plan for a Realtor that lists homes for sale.

Don't decrease your Realtor's ability to pay for these items... By the time they split their commission 1/3 for their company (sometimes ½), withhold money for taxes and medical (not in their paycheck like regular employees), pay for advertising, websites, tours, flyers, internet sites and internet specific sites for your home, they end up with about 1/3 of their commission. Decreasing their commission may decrease the valuable marketing services they can provide. All of these items, behind the scenes, reflect in your marketing and success. Leave out one website and you could eliminate hundreds of leads possible for your home. RIS Media (Real Estate Information Services) says that over half of all buyers search the internet for homes prior to buying, Realtor.com's study shows 86% of all buyers search the internet for homes prior to buying. That is significant enough to make sure it is a major part of your Realtor's marketing plan.

If you plan to sell your home, be serious about selling. Invest the time and funds necessary to bring your home up to the level that will appeal to the most buyers possible. Offer incentives, a clean, well-kept, updated product, then allow your Realtor the resources to provide the marketing needed, and get ready to move. Short cuts in most things cut into your bottom line. Getting the level of service you expect and deserve should be that simple. BE TOO GOOD TO PASS UP AND YOUR HOME WILL BE SOLD!