“Setting the stage for a home sale” |
| Setting the stage for a home sale Posted: 06 Mar 2011 12:17 AM PST Barbie and Brian Ballschmidt went out for breakfast and lunch on Saturday. While they were out, their Fort Wayne home went from lived-in to lovable. An army of 17 volunteers led by Realtors Gina Zimmerman and Jodi Skowronek used the couple's house in the Black Hawk Farm addition to bring their version of home-makeover TV shows to northeast Fort Wayne. Zimmerman, who teaches a course in home staging at IPFW, wanted to make a point. In today's real estate market, professionally staging a home can make the difference between a quick sale and no sale. "If you have three houses and one looks good, that's the one people go for. Everyone wants a house they can move right into," says Zimmerman, who works with Century 21-Bradley Realty, Fort Wayne. Zimmerman says she stages all of her listed homes to compete in what has become a prolonged buyer's market with depressed home values. "If the homeowner isn't willing to stage, then we part ways," she says. "It's really hard for an agent to stay excited about a home with broken things or untidy things." Staging, Zimmerman says, uses different principles than decorating. Generally, it involves paring down items rather than adding them. It also works to neutralize, rather than personalize, décor. Standing in a 16-by-20-foot family room with beamed ceilings and a brick fireplace on Saturday morning, Skowronek told class member volunteers Yvonne Bullock and Melissa Wiehe to pull most items out of the room. Into boxes that once held bananas went 90 percent of the books lining shelves on either side of the fireplace, nearly two dozen family photographs, and religious art and figurines collected by Barbie Ballschmidt, 47, who works arranging church-sponsored mission trips. "We need to make the room look bigger," said Skowronek, a certified home stager along with Zimmerman. "People are looking for square footage, and this room has a lot, but it doesn't look like it." Meanwhile, other volunteers were carting furniture and other items out of the living room and the home's four bedrooms. Some of it was packed in the garage's designated storage area. Other items were placed in what Zimmerman called "the shopping area" – a pile the crew used to accessorize a different room. Zimmerman says the homeowners gave her $500 in spending money, which went mostly for new bedroom linens, towels and pillows to freshen colors. The homeowners helped by stripping dated blue-and-pink-flowered wallpaper from the master bedroom and repainting the walls the color of creamy coffee. Staging expenses pay off, Zimmerman says, because a home is likely to sell more quickly and for full price. Barbie Ballschmidt says having the home staged for her was "a real blessing." She travels for her job, and her husband, 47, an engineer, was recently transferred from Navistar in Fort Wayne to Illinois. The couple want to get the house sold and move by June 1. The family has lived in the house for 13 years. The Ballschmidts' daughter, Brianna, 23, is a recent college graduate who just moved back home while their son, Brandon, 20, is away at college. "We'd be foolish not to (stage)," Barbie Ballschmidt says. "It's a relief in a lot of ways because they're going to be cleaning and packing and doing all the stuff we would be doing on our own – and probably doing it better." The family room attested to the scope of the change. Gone were a dated and out-of-scale coffee table and silk flower garlands over the bookcases; in came a rag rug that tied together the colors of the room and a new flower print over the fireplace. "There's so much space!" said Barbie on her arrival home. "I can't believe this." Even Zimmerman seemed amazed at the transformations. She plans to list the two-story home for about $150,000. "What people need to realize is when you're selling your home, it's no longer your home but a product. We want it to be the product that is top shelf, that everybody will reach for," she says. "Buyers have to imagine themselves living in your home, and they can't imagine what they can't see." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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