Home Staging Expert®


established in 1999

WHAT'S NEW?

6 Ways to Stage Your Home for Less Than $1,000

By Anne Kates Smith, Senior Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Staging a home for sale is all about making it inviting to the largest number of potential buyers. If a home is vacant, a stager will haul in furniture and décor so buyers can imagine themselves living there. If it's occupied, the stager will declutter, neutralize and decorate for the masses.

Staging won't make a home sell for more than it's worth. But it can set your home apart and boost the selling price to the top of the range for comparable homes. It can also...

[ Read Full Article ]


Budget Home Updates

By Kara Wahlgren HGTV's FrontDoor - www.FrontDoor.com

Most homeowners have a room or two they'd like to overhaul, and when you're looking to sell, those must-do projects seem even more important. But while a major renovation might boost your home's value, does anyone really have the bottomless bank account to fund those big projects? The average staging budget is only 1 percent to 3 percent of your home's value -- hardly enough to finance those handmade hickory cabinets for your kitchen or marble mantle for your...

[ Read Full Article ]


Service advises how to stage home before sale

By Jamie Jung www.stevenspointjournal.com

Home Staging is a very new and growing trend and Yockers launched her business in January.

"This is very unique to this area," Yockers said. "There are other stagers in Appleton and Marshfield, and larger cities generally have them."

Yockers said home staging basically brings a trained, impersonal, third-party set of eyes into a home to make suggestions to homeowners who plan to sell their homes.

"Research shows...

[ Read Full Article ]


Eye Appeal is Buy Appeal in Real Estate

By Joseph Kellard http://theamericanindividualist.blogspot.com

Decorator Evelyn Truhn stands in a young lady's bedroom evaluating three teens in bikinis on a wall. The trio return her stare from a poster of the surfer movie "Blue Crush," but Truhn says it must go. "You'd expect it in a kid's room," the Oceanside woman remarks, "but a poster with bikini-clad girls when you want to sell is not good."

When Truhn decorates a house, she comes with an eye to strip it of most things personal -- from photos of loved ones lining a fireplace...

[ Read Full Article ]


Best Markets for Buyers

By Matt Woolsey Forbes.com

If you're searching for property in Tampa, luck is on your side. Too many listed homes and not enough buyers means you've got the upper hand.

Want all-new appliances or $20,000 knocked off the asking price before you sign? Chances are, sellers there are willing to comply.

The same can be said for Minneapolis and Kansas City. All three, like Tampa, currently benefit buyers, thanks to an overabundance of supply and low sales rate.

...

[ Read Full Article ]


Set the Stage: Boost your current home's resale potential

Today, there are more existing homes on the market than just a year or two ago, so moving your home quickly may take a little more effort. We asked two top local stagers to help. Lori Matzke and Deanna Ryan shared with us their top ten tips for setting the stage to sell your home quickly and profitably!

1. Start at the Curb

Lori Matzke: "Buyers will keep on driving and never stop if they aren't...

[ Read Full Article ]


SELL THIS HOUSE

By Aimee Blanchette Minneapolis Star & Tribune

Join Lawrence and Suzanne Taylor on a tour of their about-to-be-listed house to find out what it's going to take to sell - and pick up a few tips that might help you when it's your turn.

Super Bowl Sunday is the unofficial kickoff to the spring real estate market, and Lawrence and Suzanne Taylor want to make sure that their house in St. Paul's Mac-Groveland neighborhood sells quickly. So we asked local real estate experts for...

[ Read Full Article ]


Setting the stage for a sale

By Elizabeth Bettendorf - St. Petersburg Times

Twenty years ago, professional real estate stager Judy Kincaid started telling friends what they needed to do to sell their homes.

Rip out that old carpet, she said.

Corral the clutter.

Clean out the closets.

"People don't always want to know what's wrong with their homes - you have to learn to be very diplomatic," she explained in a kindly but firm tone.

Kincaid,...

[ Read Full Article ]


Home Staging

By Lori Matzke printed in Divorce Magazine

Home staging isn't interior design -- and it's not home decorating. It's when you put your home's best features forward to create a buyer-friendly environment. If you're preparing your home for sale, you should realize that once it's on the market, it's no longer your home. It's a product. And selling your home is all about first impressions. Potential buyers usually take about 10 to 15 minutes, tops, to walk through a home and decide whether they like it or not....

[ Read Full Article ]


Home Staging

From ABC 7 News in Chicago

Newspaper Columnist Lori Matzke calls herself "A Domestic Fitness Guru." She's a Home Staging Expert™ who wants the public to know how to make their homes sell faster -- and for more money. And she wants to make it all very easy.

"I hear these horror stories about staging experts who go into homes, have the owners move out to a motel, bring in a huge crew, and then work round the clock for two or three days, hauling in outside...

[ Read Full Article ]


Make Any Room Look Bigger

By Dinah Eng printed in Chicago Realtor

Your new listing has a very small living room, bathrooms, or kitchen. What do you do?

Just because you're given small spaces to work with in preparing a home for market doesn't mean that you're stuck with them. You can easily make any room look larger or more attractive, according to designers and home stagers who have developed strategies to show off the best features of every room in a house.

The key, say the experts, is to get rid...

[ Read Full Article ]