Speaking Up about Home Staging

Looking for a great little townhome, close to everything, in Mt. Pleasant?  These 1126 sqft, 2 bdrm 2 bath units may be exactly what you are looking for! We had the pleasure of staging one of the units this week and found the upgrades to be wonderful.  If you would like to view these townhomes in person, please contact the listing agent Deane Bridwell with Agent Owned.

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

One of my fabulous stagers, David Moon, did most of the work in this amazing transformation.  This very small condo (1126, 2bdrms, 2.5 ba) has a living room/dining room combo that frankly wasn't showing well.  Buyers simply did not feel that their furniture would fit in this space.... Here is the ONLY photo showing this room in MLS.

As you can see, it doesn't look particularly large.  It was very clear why the room needed staging.  Agents, of course, were concerned about the price as it also wasn't getting much traffic. 

After staging and adding these photos to MLS, I have no doubt that showings will dramatically increase and they will actually close some deals!  Here are David's after photos:

Clearly these are not taken from the same angle, but which would make potential buyers more likely to be enticed into viewing this property? 

We also staged the kitchen, powder room and 2nd bedroom, which they wanted used as an office....

As usual, David has outdone himself and I'm looking forward to hearing rave reviews from the builder and agents!

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

Ok, I'll admit that I've been guilty of this in the past.  Sometimes I'm good at keeping track of things, and then I get busy and don't have solid system so things get away from me.  This year Bevin & I are dedicated to keeping better track of our statistics and we've learned some really interesting things! 

We discussed creating a staged home tracking system that would allow us to know how many homes we had staged in a year but then never did it as we always seemed to put it on the back burner - other things were always more important. This year we made it a priority and we are so glad that we did! Not only did the tracking system help us understand how much work we actually do, but it is also helping us close more deals!

How can a tracking system help close more deals?  It's pretty simple really - it allows us better information to follow up with potential clients.  Here's an example....

We gave several quotes the first week of March.  Some of them had staged, some hadn't.  Last week we followed up with the quotes that didn't stage with this email....

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"I just wanted to stay in touch with you on this property.  I have some new statistical information I thought your clients would be interested in hearing.... Since we previewed your listing on 03/06/09:

1148 Harbor Trace, James Island ($395,000) was staged on 1/13/09 went under contract on 3/16/09 - just over 60 days.  It was originally listed on 05/04/07 - over 18 month time on market prior to staging.

862 Fairlawan, Mt. Pleasant ($249,000) was staged on 02/24/09 at time of listing.  It went under contract on 03/17/09 - 21 days after staging.

570 Hobcaw Bluff, Mt. Pleasant (415,000) was staged on 03/11/09 & went under contract on 03/20/09 - 9 days after staging.  It was originally listed on 08/03/08 - 7 months of time on market prior to staging. 

While the market may have its issues, it is clear that staging does make a difference.  Saving days on market not only saves money in carrying costs, but also helps protect equity.  The longer the home stays on the market, the more price reductions it will take and the lower the offers will be.  I just thought your clients might want to know that this is the best time of the year to sell the home - there are a lot of buyers in the market right now, as I know you already know.  Staging will make the most of every opportunity!"

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If you had your home for sale and knew that this was going on, wouldn't you begin to feel that not staging was a mistake?  If you had a listing and knew this was going on, wouldn't you feel that this is something you really needed to make your client understand the importance of?  

Adding a tracking system will allow you to track how busy you actually are - for instance, between January 1 and March 1 (we won't have March's numbers until the end of the month) we provided 51 staging quotes/written consultations. 

We are able to determine what happened to all of the homes we quoted or consulted on, helping us to go back later with hard numbers.  We'll be able to say how many of our homes sold vs remained on the market.  We'll know how many we lost to other stagers, or never decided to stage and went unsold.   

If you haven't already started tracking your statistics, now is the time before too much of the year goes by!  For our newsletter members, you can download our tracking system for free under the members only section!

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

We've been staging crazy lately - spring is here and our local agents and sellers are really 'getting it'!  Because I've been updating my status with all our progress this week on twitter and facebook, I've gotten a lot of comments and questions on how we get this kind of volume. 

The answer is really pretty simple, we market ourselves like crazy and rely on highly competant agents to help us close the deal. 

The first thing that we have to do is let everyone know what we do.  Our biggest marketing push is through newsletters.  Almost every new client, that doesn't come from a referral from one of our current agents, is from our newsletter.  (If you want more info on our newsletters, I've written many blogs about them, just go through my archives.)

The second thing we do is to spend time educating agents.  We offer lunch & learn courses, agents courses (where the goal is to teach them how to talk about staging to their clients, not teach them how to stage) and of course office presentations (though we do few of those really). 

The third thing we do is to flood the market with statistics, photographs and visual tours of our work.  Each vacant home we stage gets posted in all the local communities of AR, which also gets linked to in Facebook and Twitter.  We put the RES on our website and provide photos and RES for our newsletters.  We provide quality statistics and photos to agents to use when discussing staging with their clients. 

Sometimes the simplist actions lead to the biggest rewards.  You don't always have to be elaborate.  Sometimes being direct and targeted will provide you with the market penetration you strive for. 

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

This is another great listing by Leesa Northrup (lnorthrup@carolinaone.com) of Carolina One Real Estate that we had the pleasure of staging today.  With a wooded lot that backs up to protected wetlands, a fantastic community dock, neighborhood swimming pools, tennis courts, close to shopping and more, this home won't last long!

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

Ah, before you think I'm getting all high on myself, this home was staged by my business partner, Bevin Googer.  I actually staged a very similar unit to this one, but she managed to get the seller to do one thing that I could not, no matter how hard I tried, PAINT! 

This great little condo downtown has some fantastic detail work that no one was able to see....

Suddenly we are able to notice the crown molding, 6" baseboards and great trimwork detail around the windows and doors....

Unfortunately she couldn't get them to paint every room, but staging did make a tremendous difference in this master suite....

The before is not exactly MLS worthy is it?  There was nothing to look at in this vanilla room...

visit this link to view visual tour we provided for this client

Feedback from the agent was our favorite part of staging this charming downtown unit....

"You made (insert seller's name) cry, the condo's so beautiful now. She is incredibly pleased. Thank you very much.  I'm pleased too ! Can't wait to get the photos on line. You're the best !   Respectfully,   Tod"

This is a new agent and this is his first staging job.... something tells me that he will be a repeat client!

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

Seriously, this is a quote from the lovely neighbors who stopped by our staging job as we (David Moon, my assistant Sue, and I) worked away late into the night.... This makes me so sad to hear, and believe me, even sadder for the agent and the seller.  In this case, the seller is the bank - the builder, who never had the home staged, unfortunately had the home forclosed on.  This is despite the fact that while this home was being built, we had sucessfully staged and sold 3 other units on this very street, in a small, new subdivision!

This agent, very savvy, and part of a team of dedicated professionals has been advocating staging to the bank since she took the listing. She knows that we routinely stage and quickly sell listings for her team.  These are the actual MLS photos....

I'm sure you can already see the problem buyers were having.  The house is small and cottage like.  There are no walls to put furniture up against & if you use the area deemed to be the dining room (last photo) then that leaves a gaping useless space between the family room and the bar area.  Too much for most people to worry about, so they just move on....

As the neighbors so aptly pointed out to us upon seeing our finished product, "I guess you figured it out."  Here was our solution to the furniture layout problem....

If you are a seller or an agent, please take this example to heart - this doesn't have to continue happening.  Quality professional home stagers are in a town near you...

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

This week we had the fun task of staging a great home in West Ashley for Samantha Ensign (samantha.ensign@cbunited.com) Coldwell Banker United.  I love the sunlight that poured through all the ultra large windows as we staged this unit! 

This home has great details from floor to ceiling - literally!  If you have clients who are looking for a great 4 bedroom 3 bath home in West Ashley, be sure to check this one out!

Only a week ago Bevin and I were in sunny Orlando, FL with some of the great women in this industry!  We had a phenomenal time and are sad that we won't be attending another one until September, when we will be at the Expo in Indianpolis (that's right Gary & Linda, this time we are coming to see you!)...

I know you've heard from many of the attendees so I wanted to give my perspective as both an attendee, a vendor and a speaker....

(I think you'll recognize some AR faces here)

Cort was a pleasure to work with at this venue.  The staff was amazingly friendly and helpful (not to mention quite funny).  They gave us more than enough room to spread out and conduct fantastic educational sessions. 

From a vendor stand point:  If you have a service or product that you wish to introduce or promote to the staging industry, this was a great venue.  The attendees were very interested in value producing activities and products. 

From an attendee stand point:  There was so much to learn from the amazing speakers... Terrylynn Fisher, Kym Hough, Christine Rae, Shell Brodnax and several other very competant and motivational women.  If you didn't take away something amazing to enhance your business, you weren't listening!  I've been doing this business for a few years now and run a very successful business, but there is so much to learn from others who also run successful businesses.  Even if you are successful, you should still attend, there is still much to learn from this group!

From a speaker standpoint:  The audiences were amazing!  Stagers sat quickly gotting notes upon notes intently listening, participating and asking great questions.  As a speaker, knowing that your audience is engaged and actually absorbing what you have to say feels great.  I have received many emails from attendees thanking me for my time and information and I feel confident that the time I put into this event will help grow these women's businesses, which is afterall why I took the time for this event in the first place.  So, for all of you who were in my audience, THANK YOU!  I received as much from you at this event as you received from me. 

Echoing all the blogs I have seen throughtout the last week.... if there is a StagersList Expo near you, GO - SIGN UP NOW!  You absolutely will feel that the money and time was well spent.  The investment is minimal and the rewards are great.....

There is one last little thing that I didn't mention.... FRIENDSHIP.  Many of these women (and some men who were in attendance) now feel like good friends.  For those of you who love the rain and feel that the other bloggers are just friends you haven't met yet - why not meet them?  It will surprise you what a bond you already have with everyone!

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First Impressions Home Staging & Interior ReDesign is a nationally award winning company owned and operated in Summerville, SC a suburb of Charleston, SC.  We provide high quality staging for both occupied and vacant homes in the greater surrounding areas and beyond!  For more information please visit, www.WeStageSC.com.  If you are interested in learning about making Home Staging your profession, please visit, www.StagingAndRedesign.com for more information.

Sean Jager of Carolina One Real Estate recently referred one of his sellers to our company to have their lovely vacant home on Daniel Island staged to sell.  Both nervous and excited, the seller met us at the home when the movers were bringing everything in and was in love with just about every piece.  I can't wait until she opens her email and sees the final results....

If you are looking for a home in Daniel Island, this home is a MUST SEE!  The attention to detail and many upgrades make this home incredibly afforable... no doubt it will be gone quickly!