After 2 Years, Home Staging Sells House in 10 Days!!

I love what I do. Not only do I get to help families make one of the biggest decisions of their lives by helping them find the perfect home for them, but I also get to help sellers who may have been struggling for months (or even years!) to get their homes sold by helping them "stage" their houses to appeal to the widest array of buyers.

Case in point: my most recent listing is a house that had been on and off the market for 2 years. The owners, who lived a little over an hour away, had purchased the home for their kids to live in while they attended UK to save on housing costs (and make a good investment). The problem was, once the kids all graduated, the housing market started tightening up and no matter how many realtors they tried, they simply weren't able to get the home sold.

Now, many real estate agents would say that if the house had been on the market that long, it must have been overpriced, so dropping the price 8-10% would be the obvious solution. And I suspect the house would have sold had they dropped the price that much -- after all, most anything will sell if you drop the price low enough.

But in my opinion, the house wasn't particularly over-priced. The big problem was that the house, a great 3br, 2ba house near the UK campus, was an older home and although the owners had taken great care to keep the important systems up-to-date -- hvac, roof and water heater all replaced within the past 5 years -- it was vacant. This, in my opinion, was making it hard for the target market -- students and young professionals -- to envision the house as a charming, updated space they could identify with.

The owners had made a half-hearted attempt to stage the house themselves -- they had brought in some living room furniture they had left over from their last move and an older bedroom suite they had inherited -- but that didn't seem to be helping. After all, if you put older, dated furniture in a house, the house ends up looking dated, which was the main obstacle we needed to overcome.

So...what to do? We could have rented furniture at an approximate cost of $300/month per room, staging only the main rooms (eat-in kitchen, family room, master bedroom and the two baths) but that would leave us with the possibility of an ongoing expense, plus the fact that we would still need accessories for the house -- artwork, vases, bed/bath linens and kitchen decor. Without accessories the house would simply look as if it someone had placed a few pieces of furniture in some of the rooms, but it wouldn't look like a "home."

So, instead the sellers and I put our heads together, combed through their extra furniture, my staging furniture/accessories and came up with a budget -- we initially set a budget of $500, but expanded that to $800 after we decided to stage every room in the house (this is not typically the case, but we felt the layout of this particular house called for it).

We used the old, green plaid sofa they'd taken out of their basement to put in the family room and covered it with a lovely fitted slipcover (I can't say enough about the stretchy, 2-piece slipcovers by Surefit. They conform to the shape of the furniture and people did a double-take when I told them the sofa was slipcovered.) I brought in $20 utility carts with the wheels removed that I painted black to use as end tables. I used headboards and accessories I'd picked up at Goodwill and Big Lots, and a non-working, flat-screen tv bought on Craigslist for $20 to show young home-owners where they could place their tv (something many decorators like to ignore, but is, realistically, a concern for many home buyers.)

We splurged on window treatments, putting $25 bamboo shades on half the windows and Walmart curtains on the others. And we did spend $100 on 2 new bedding sets (one purchased for $40 at Big Lots and the other for $60 at the Linens & Things Going-Out-of-Business Sale. We also purchased new, fluffy towels and a shower curtain for one of the bathrooms.

Finally, the sellers, whom I must thank for being so willing to do whatever was necessary to get the house sold, spent a weekend repainting the kitchen a soft, butter yellow and putting a nice crisp coat of black paint on the front door. They also removed an old VW Bug that was being stored in the garage and put up some new shelves in the master bath.

All told, we spent 2 weeks (in between our other committments) getting the house ready for sale. Not an insignificant amount of time, but my gut (and experience) told me that this house had a lot to offer and it just needed some professional staging to show it off to its true potential.

The result? We had several calls the first week and a well-attended open house where the comments were overwhelmingly positive. It took only a few showings to uncover an interested buyer (one who had been looking for over 6 months). He liked the house a lot, but, according to his realtor, he still wanted to take a look at 2 other houses (which were both listed for $80,000 more than this house, which we listed for $195,000).

Despite the fact that the 2 higher-priced listings had upgraded granite countertops and more square footage, they werent showing as well as they could due to some outdated light fixtures/furnishings and dark paint in several rooms. And the buyer, while he did appreciate the ktichen upgrades in these houses, ultimately determined that our listing "felt like home" to him and he "could see himself living there." (hurray for staging!).

Within days, the buyer had visited our listing a 2nd time, and by the 10th day the house was on the market, we had a signed contract. We have since had a successful inspection and have negotiated a few minor repairs that the enthusiastic sellers were happy to perform. We're scheduled to close December 8 -- 6 weeks after the house hit the market and just 2 months after the sellers initially contacted me in a state of frustration, wondering why their great house just wouldn't sell.

The moral of the story: yes, this is a tough market. There are fewer buyers in the market and office-wide, we're seeing fewer calls for each house we have listed. But houses can and do still sell -- no matter the market, if the three P's are covered: Price, Promotion and Presentation (staging). I work hard to promote my clients' houses online and in person; I do a competitive market analysis to ensure we're priced at a fair market rate; but the ingredient that's been the key to success for me the past couple of years has been staging my listings to show them off to their best advantage.

Since I started staging homes 2 years ago, I have yet to have a staged home expire its listing or not sell. That's right -- every home I've staged/listed has sold. So far, the longest it's taken for any of my staged homes to sell is 58 days, with an average time on market of 1 month.

If you're in a similar position as the sellers of this house -- faced with either dropping your price $10,000-$15,000 or letting it sit on the market for another 3, 6 or 12 months, give me a call. I routinely sell houses in 4-6 weeks that other agents haven't been able to get sold after 4-6 months. Let me put my staging and market experience to work for you.

Pics of the staged home that just sold:

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