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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Less can be more when selling your home


Workers install new kitchen cabinets at the home of Joe and Linda Rank in Austin, Texas. Kitchens are among the most important areas of the home to spend some money upgrading before selling.
 (AP / The Spokesman-Review)
Jessie Milligan McClatchy Newspapers

FORT WORTH, Texas — The “I Love Lucy” motif in the kitchen? It has to go. The piles of every copy of Good Housekeeping since 1972? Those can’t stay.

Julie Gonzalez, 33, of Keller, Texas, is a “home stager” who diplomatically tells home sellers to do just that — “depersonalize” their space.

Get rid of collections, family photos and all the excess of daily lives.

Homeowners need a competitive edge to sell houses faster these days. The typical selling season of spring and summer just ended, and it was a particularly sluggish time for sales of existing homes. At the same time, new home construction continues.

Real estate agents and home stagers — the professionals who style homes for sale — say sellers need to realize that pristine new homes are the competition, and that means it’s its time to do some cleaning and painting.

“Sellers need to get started on the road to thinking, ‘This is no longer my home. This is a property on the market,’” says Terry McCord of First Class Interior, a Grapevine, Texas-based home-staging business.

That psychological shift can cause sellers to take down the distracting displays of personal photographs, paint the walls something other than their favorite colors and look at their homes with a more critical eye.

Home sellers have little to no say on the number of potential buyers who walk through. Even the selling price only has so much elasticity. The most control comes with another major selling point — the condition of the home, from the front yard to the house’s interior, including its decor.

Yet often decor is often overlooked when preparing a home to sell.

“Every home for sale needs a personality, but you don’t want it to have your personality,” McCord says. “You want buyers to imagine living there themselves. Your children are beautiful, but the 8-by-10s in the dining room? They have to go.”

“Clean, clean, clean,” says Gonzalez of Impress2Sell, the home-staging business she runs with her mother, Kay LaBruyere of Watauga, Texas. “The competition is new homes. That means you need to get down and clean the baseboards.”

Consider the problem of the financial double-whammy.

One of the biggest mistakes home sellers make is deciding not to paint interior walls or replace dingy carpet, says Larry Johnson, president of the Arlington (Texas) Board of Realtors.

Instead of doing the work themselves, sellers may offer an allowance to cover those costs or agree to drop the price of the house.

It’s a technique that doesn’t work well, Johnson says.

The seller may be agreeing to pay for the fixups at the same time the buyers is deciding to offer less for the home — if he decides to make an offer at all.

“The buyer should have the choice of picking the work he wants to do,” Johnson says.

Open Closets

“Take half of everything out of every closet and put it in storage,” says Chris Lanman of Premier Property Staging in Fort Worth, Texas.

Empty homes don’t sell as well as furnished ones, home stagers say. But overly furnished homes don’t do as well, either. One way to stage your own home is to move all furniture and accessories out of one room, then start adding it back one piece at a time until you have a minimal arrangement.

“Minimal” is the key word.

“What you are selling is square footage,” McCord says. “They have to be able to see the square footage.”

A stager’s eye for design may come in handy. If sellers don’t want to spend the roughly $200-$500 for a consultation, they may want to remember at least this one rule: Make sure there is a good “flow” so that visitors can easily walk through the room. That doesn’t mean all the furniture needs pushed up against the walls. It only means the room needs to be navigable.

Use them sparingly and in groups of one, three or five, Gonzalez says. Anything more is a personal collection that will be distracting.

Gonzalez likes to bring things in from the outdoors to freshen a room inexpensively. She’ll use twigs or greenery in a vase, or frame leaves from the seller’s trees.

Make sure only furniture in good shape goes back in the room. Slipcovers are handy to disguise in disguising worn or dated furniture. Furniture touch-up pens, available at big-box home-supply stores, are good for covering scratches in wood, Gonzalez says. She always brings them to a job.

Painting a room in a neutral color doesn’t mean it has to be all white.

“White is too cold. It’s a cold, sterile color,” McCord says. “Choose something warm. Beige or sage, for instance.”

Fresh paint is important. Paint that looks worn or dated in color will raise concerns.

“What a buyer is going to perceive is that this house is not maintained, and (they will think) ‘What else haven’t they taken care of?’.” McCord says.

“People are busy now, and moving is very traumatic,” McCord says. “The idea of moving into a new house and then bringing the yard up to speed is very difficult for them. They don’t have time.”