Ready for Market. Julie F Sullivan
Next Door, there’s Craig’s List – there are a thousand different options out there and some of them are very good for folks, depending on what neighborhood you’re in, and some of them aren’t (regarding safety). You need to be cautious. But there are certainly many online, especially on Facebook, there are a lot of facebook groups now that are doing this. They are trading things, they’re getting rid of things on the cheap and that’s a great way to go.
I have to say I am not really a fan of yard sales. Yard sales are a lot of time and a lot of effort for very little return so if you’re expecting to get a huge bang for your buck at a yard sale just realize that at the end of it someone’s still going to have to take all that stuff to charity.
JULIE: Everything that didn’t sell; that old rower machine that didn’t sell is still going to have to be hauled somewhere right?
MARY CATE: That’s right, and maybe the $200 you made from the yard sale is now going to gas and taking all these things around. So look into your options about charities that will come an pick up for free, there really are so many options out there.
MARY CATE: You made a joke earlier like, “Oh I want to go to check that out, I am looking for a vacation!” I mean why not? Why not use some of the things that are no longer loved or needed or used in our home right now and put them up for a little bit of cash in our pockets. And of course, again, lessening the burden on our loved ones when we’re gone – truly, I can’t think of a better gift that my parents ever gave me, except of course my child rearing, love and education, but to give me the gift of downsizing before I have to do it – that’s just extreme. I mean how many parents can say that? it’s a wonderful thing and I think once people start doing it, whether you’re in your forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties; you have this sense of freedom. The letting go can be sad and tough in the interim but then you’re like, “Oh my gosh I’m free! I don’t have to stay at home and clean my house and go through my basement this weekend, I can go enjoy my grandkids or take a trip to Africa.
Feeling and Flow
Christie Birch
Energizing Spaces
CHRISTIE: I've had a home staging business for over eight years. I absolutely love it; it’s such a great way to help people at one of the most stressful times in their lives. Moving is one of the top five stressors and there is a lot going on, a lot of the time there’s a job change or possibly a divorce or a family change, a downsize and a move can just be a really, really stressful time. So I love being able to come in and help make that a more enjoyable time and actually even an energizing time for our clients. One of the things I do is come in with or without the realtors – and go through the home and really just take a look at the house with a fresh eye.
If I’m designing for a client personally for their house I want to make it all about them and really personalize it. When I’m staging though, we come in and we want to depersonalize and really make it more toward the target buyer. So I go in and my goal is to not really give the buyers any recommendations that aren’t going to make them more money and sell their house more quickly. And my niche is to go in and give people the ideas that are going to give them the biggest bang for the buck. I don’t like to do a lot of cosmetic surgery but just a little bit of make up to show the house off.
JULIE: So for example, when you say you don’t like to do cosmetic surgery, would that mean that you don’t recommend that they change countertops for example or upgrade flooring?
CHRISTIE: it really depends on the price of the home; it depends on what’s happening on the market and what’s happening with the competition. And so if they don’t have to do those things I would rather them not do them unless their home is priced such that they will definitely get that back or if the competition is stiff and they’re not going to be able to sell it without doing it then I will recommend it. But it’s not going to be just a boiler plate list of recommendations, we really talk to the realtor and study what’s happening in the market and what’s happening around them and make the recommendations from there.
JULIE: I can tell you that one of the customers that I helped last year had a very large home and they had been living in that home for about fifteen years. And it did have the original carpeting and builder’s everything – builder grade – and across the street there was a brand new housing development going in. And even though those homes were smaller, I felt like that customer really did need to upgrade some things in the home, especially the carpeting, and do some painting just to be in competition because I felt like the buyers might be younger people who were looking for upgraded finishes. What do you think about that?
CHRISTIE: I absolutely agree. And especially when we are targeting to a younger buyer, they’re very much a turn-key generation and they want things ready when they come in. And not only that, but most of them are not really the do it themselves generation as much as the baby boomers were, baby boomers were really game to go in and fix things up and put a little sweat equity in. But this new generation values their free time a little bit more and they want it ready to go. So if that’s our target buyer, I totally agree, especially if the price is high and especially if they’re competing with new properties that are on the market.
But I also think that often it’s just good to change some of those things because a new buyer will come in and they’ll think, “Oh this is going to cost me $20 000 to get this in order” where in reality it’s actually going to be more like $7 000 and if it’s just done then they’re going to be signing a contract. We just want the buyers to come in and have as few negatives as possible and as many positives as possible and just keep them nodding their heads.
JULIE: What other type of things do you do? I know you said putting make up on, so for example, what would that be?
CHRISTIE: Really when I stage a house, one of the biggest keys is to get the rooms balanced and functional. So the people that I’m staging for may have great furniture and the colors might be great but it just needs to be balanced – some things just need to be taken out. We really want a flow of energy to go through the home. People can come into a home and think “wow this feels really great” and they’re not even sure why but really the home purchase if often made emotionally and so it’s that feeling that you get when you walk in a home. You may say, “Oh I want this, this, this and this” but then you walk into another home that may not have necessarily all of those things, but as soon as you feel it you’re connected with it. So we do a lot of things that you really can’t quite put your finger on – sort of like advertising. We really get the rooms balanced, we have the right focal points accentuated and we have the right colors. We do a lot of upgrading, just very inexpensively. So if there’s a floral sofa with ruffles on it we put a tan cover over it and put maybe some modern pillows over it and a modern piece of art and all of a sudden that room is ready for our target buyer, which is usually a younger buyer. So that’s the kind of thing I mean when I say putting a little make up on. If the countertop is…
JULIE: Pink?
CHRISTIE: Okay, say the countertop is pink. I just did a pink bathroom the other day and the couple really did not want to, they just said, “No, the countertop is not in the budget.” So what we did is we just brought some charcoal grey in with it with some black and white pieces of art and it just became a very sophisticated place. So what that will do for the buyer is let them know that – they might fall in love with the pink bathroom but most of the are going to say, “I don’t really want the pink bathroom but this is kind of fun enough, it is funky enough the way it is right now. I can live with it for a year until I get it changed.”
JULIE: I see, I did have a customer last year who did have pink countertops and that was the big question that she had and also I had: Should we invest in granite or quartz because we know that’s the finish that people are looking for nowadays? And this was a pink Formica in the kitchen. She chose not to upgrade that, we did upgrade the carpeting and flooring in that house and repaint everything and it really looked nice. And of course we took into consideration the color of the countertops as we picked the wall colors and the flooring colors, not that we picked anything in the pink range, but we picked something neutral that would coordinate