Sharon Roark's Blog: Home Staging

If you're thinking of selling your home, you may be pondering some fast fix-ups to help your home compete in this tough marketplace. But which improvements will give you the most bang for your buck and which will likely have you investing more than you could ever possibly recoup?

Well, some of this depends, of course, on the price-range of your home. One of the things you'll want to keep in mind is that when it comes to improving your home to get it sold, the name of the game is "keeping up with the Jones" but not outdoing the Jones. So if everyone in your price range has laminate countertops, installing granite may be overdoing it unless you can figure out a very affordable way to get the job done. And that's the focus of this post -- how to make some…

There are many prognosticators making predictions about what 2009 will bring to the housing market; some predict good things, other predict bad things and a few think real estate in markets like Lexington KY will begin to see a recovery while the harder-hit markets will continue to flounder.

While I don't claim to be able to read tea leaves, I am looking optimistically ahead to the new year and have put together some thoughts on what I hope occurs this year that I think will help get the housing market headed in the right direction.

So, without further ado, here are my hopes for 2009:

I hope interet rates stay low. Whether you're looking at homes for sale in Lexington, KY or in Miami, FL, low rates are certainly an incentive to buy a home. I wish there…

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…

Home staging has helped sell another home quickly, this time in Frankfort KY. This lovely home (pictured below) in Two Creeks subdivision sold in just 3 weeks -- in an area where homes are routinely sitting on the market for up to a year or more.

There's no doubt that proper pricing played a role in this sale (as it does in all home sales) but the hard work my client and I did staging the home to ensure it appealed to the widest array of buyers helped it sell in a matter of weeks. Removing some of the furniture, cleaning out and organizing the panty, placing attractive accessories on the kitchen counters -- these are just a few of the extra steps I worked with my clients on that paid off in a big way in a very short time

If you or someone you know is…