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June 2006

Staging a Home for Sale – 10 More Ideas You CAN Use Part II

Posted at 12:21 PM, Jun. 30, 2006

Staging a Home for Sale – 10 More Ideas You CAN Use.

Part II

If you have gathered all your personal items into storage boxes and removed bulky furniture to create good traffic flow throughout the home, here are some additional tips to complete the Staging-For-Sale process.

1)     Buyers like neutral walls, so cover any walls which do not look fresh and clean or those with loud or pastel colors, with beige or off-white paint.  Freshly painted walls are by far the most effective change you can make when selling your home.  Years of dirty marks from moving furniture, children’s dirty handprints and high traffic dirty areas particularly around light switches) are covered instantly with a fresh coat of paint.  Hire a local teenager to help you out.  Remember to tackle painting only one room at a time as painting walls can be, well, boring, messy and quite physical. 

2)     Once painting is completed, stand in the entrance to each room and quickly focus on the first place your eyes take you when you are looking in. 

• Are you looking at a window?
• Are you looking at a niche in the wall?
• Are you looking at an archway over a window?

There must be something in the room, where your eyes naturally travel and focus.  Even if the room is bare-bones and has only 4 walls and window, the window will be the focus.  (If the room has only four walls and no focus area, we will cover in another staging article how to create a focus space from that which does not exist.)

Whatever section of the room your eyes will focus upon will be used to accentuate that particular space.  Creating a focus area in the room creates a memory of that space, evokes an emotion (nice, comfortable, bright, cheery, etc.); all of which we plan will be a positive emotion the buyer will remember!  Thus, helping to sell your home!

3)  If you have blinds on the windows, remove them even though it may mean a few months of losing some privacy while the home is being sold. (At night, just thumbtack a sheet over the window for temporary privacy and take it down in the morning before buyers come through the home.  (There will be some amount of inconvenience in staging a home, but again, it is the final sale price that will make you realize, “The inconvenience was well-worth it!”) The use of natural light in any room makes the space appear larger and offers a positive psychological affect of being ‘bright’ and ‘cheery’….all emotions that buyers need to visualize when making a home purchase.  Remember, the price of the home could be well within the means of the buyer, but if the home shows as ‘dreary’ or ‘dark’, you may not get your sale price. 

4)  Add attractive window coverings:

Hang a simple rod across the window and drape decorative handkerchiefs or colorful cloth napkins from the rod to make a colorful valance.  If you decide to hang a curtain be sure to pull the sides together with a ribbon, a piece of raffia or a napkin ring.  I have even used a braided piece of old rags, colorful yarn and hemp string as ties for curtains.  (Pre-teens and teenagers love to spend hours braiding, so ask them to do it!)

5) If the view from the window is not so appealing and the sight is something you wish to downplay, then add a shear curtain to that rod and hang the cloth napkins over the top.  The main focus is to offer as much natural light to the room and to ‘neaten-up’ the window taking away the harder edges of the sill and the window frame.  Be sure to repair any screens before exposing the outside through the window. If you do not have time to repair the screens, just pop them out for the staging but remember the screen is missing if you decide to open that window.

6) If you have a bad view from a particular room and you are on the first floor, consider placing a few potted plants outside that window to block the view.  This tip will add a little greenery to the view but still permit light into the room. I have even attached a few inexpensive flower boxes to the outside of ground floor windows, planted a few inexpensive flowers in the boxes, which also serves the purposes of blocking a bad view from inside the room, allowing light through a window while offering a little instant outside landscape for the buyer to see when inspecting the perimeter of the property.

7) Once the window has been made a focal point of the room, pull together a seating area.  The same formula holds true…two chairs, one table, a lamp and small bouquet of flowers.  If you do not have a spare table, consider using a cooler, a sturdy box, an ottoman, or a large stereo speaker and cover with linen table cloth.  I happen to keep a supply of table cloths handy that have been handed down to me, even if they have stains on them, but if you do not have an extra (it has to be a cloth table cloth; not paper and not plastic) table cloth, I have used a spare folded curtain, a round of extra cloth purchased for a dollar at the dollar store or an old skirt draped over the box, the latter of which was allowed to flow down the box or table and then cover the waist hole of the skirt with a plate or a bowl filled with fruit.  No one knows the table covering is a skirt when they come through to view your home.

8) If your room does not permit room for two chairs, move the bed up against the windowed wall and into a corner.  Position pillows up against the wall and around the corner to create a pseudo-couch or seating area, even though the bed is just a bed.  In stead of folding the sheets down on the top of the bed, as you would to make the bed, spread the entire bed with one colorful blanket and tuck the edges under as best you can.  If the bed is covered in one colored blanket or sheet, it will look more like a couch than a bed.  Take that same hemp string, ribbon or long strings of braided yarn used on the curtains to wrap around the base of the bed allowing the sheet or blanket to pucker around the base of the bed.  Instant couch with a neat covering!  Add a rug in front of the bed and try to move the furniture around to allow for a small seating area. You will need to decide if you can move out a dresser or a desk in a room to make it less cluttered and keeps traffic flowing.  (See Part I, about storing extra furniture in a pod container.)

9) If the room has a high ceiling, this is a nice feature buyers often look for in newer homes.  Ceiling fans in high ceilings offer an easy and economical way to add decorative touch to the room while offering better air circulation. If you do not have a ceiling fan, check with your local home improvement store in the clearance section.  I have found open box ceiling fans in perfect condition for under $20.00.  Be sure it has a light kit if the overhead light is the only light switch in the room.  If you see a brown ceiling fan, it only takes a few minutes to paint it white to match the room.  Look at something not as what it is, but what it can be with a few changes.  Most staged items can be purchased at the dollar store or on clearance shelves so be sure to visit these areas when doing your regular shopping.

10) Rugs are useful to define space.  Rugs placed next to the two-chair formula used throughout these articles encloses the space, adds color and style to a room as well as defines that this is a sitting area.  Rooms need to be what they are to the buyer…a bedroom needs to be a bedroom and not bedroom-slash-office.  But a bedroom can show ‘more’ in the way of relaxation (not work!) by adding the two-chair formula to any room and add a nice seating area. Rugs help to define and open up those spaces.

Here are some ways to make rugs and use them for the staging.

Go to the rug store and ask them for a stack of square rug samples they no longer use.  Bring them home and use carpet tape to tape them together on the bottom of the samples.  I also like to run a line of hot glue between the rug samples before taping to add extra tightness to the joints.  Arrange the colors so they compliment something in the room where the rug will be placed.  Too many colors and it will look too busy, too few colors and it becomes boring. So the general rule is to use ‘three’…three of everything.  Three colored rug squares and then pick up those colors or shades of chosen rug colors in the pillows and any decorative pieces in the room.  Tying in colors from the bouquet you will place in each room (See Part I), is also a nice way to make the room look ‘together’.  

Staging a Home for Sale – 10 Easy Ideas You CAN Use - Part I

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Staging a Home for Sale – 10 Easy Ideas You CAN Use

Part I

Staging a home for sale means just that…setting the stage so that your home may sell faster and often times closer to the listing price than if it were not staged.

Staging allows the home to be presented as a canvas and allow the buyer to paint a picture for them; visualizing what the space will look like if they moved in with their items.  But that does not mean showing an empty home; rather staging accentuates spaces within the home by creating vignettes, which enhance positive space while downplaying negative areas within the house.

You could hire a professional stager for about $400 for a consultation and then shell out another $100 per hour for the stager to do the packing and the redecorating, OR you can do it yourself, keep the savings and put it into staging the home if you do-it-yourself.

In order to create the staging scene, understand that for the next 30-90 days, while the house is for sale, you will need to have removed personal items, collections and clutter, (and keep them ‘gone’ until you have a signed contract). Your home may lose its personal style and warmth, but that will be one of the small sacrifices you will need to make to maximize profit from the sale of your house.

Staging will require some planning as you will pack away items, which you may have kept handy just for the sake of a convenience (i.e., refrigerator door space used as a bulletin board for ‘to-do lists,’ coupons, family photos and calendars, etc.) or items which may have been left plugged (indefinitely) into electrical outlets for convenience, such a shavers and hair dryers in the bathroom; all of which add clutter to the home.

If you stage your home for sale on your own, here are 10 easy tips to remember:

1)  Make a list of all the spaces, choose one room at a time and tackle each individually.  You will be overwhelmed if you choose to do ‘the whole house’ in one afternoon.  Start with the bathroom(s) and the kitchen and then move to the common rooms and finally the bedrooms.  Basements, hallways and attics are last.  Check off each room on your list as you go helping to make you feel as if you have made some accomplishment.  Understand that packing up clutter is ‘work’ and it is time-consuming (that is why there is a $100 an hour price tag on the hiring a professional), but remember always that the savings outweighs the hard work.  By all means, ask family members to pitch-in.  Even children can pack away their toys and older children can clean a dirty shower. Plug in the Ipod or put on a CD to help the time pass a little more pleasantly. 

2)      Evaluate the colors of each room individually.  Pastel colors do not sell well.  Baby blue and princess pink are often gender-inspired colors, which are a huge turn-off for potential buyers.  Even if the buyers have children and will use the baby blue room for their own baby, they may or may not like that particular shade or, in fact may wish to use yellow or green, often considered colors, which can traditionally be used for both boys and girls. Play it safe and simply paint over the pastels with a neutral color like beige or off-white.  Any wallpaper should be removed or painted over if possible.

3)     Go to your neighborhood grocery store and ask them for empty boxes from produce as these usually have side cut-outs for easy grabbing.  Start storing empty boxes in a place for easy access a few weeks before you begin to stage.  You will need the boxes and having them handy will keep the packing momentum moving along.

4)     As you go from room to room, remove family pictures from the walls and replace them with used art from a thrift store or simply purchase framed prints from a local dollar store.  Pack away all collections including children’s Hot Wheels, baseball cap collections and any other really personal collections you and your family may be fond of.  You may leave out neutral items for decorating such as pricey crystal, Lladro, colorful depression glassware to fill in those spaces left behind when the spoon collections, baseball card collections and Formula 1 car collections come off the fireplace mantle and shelves.  This may be ‘painful’ but consider that in 30-90 days you will be able to unpack these items in your new home and enjoy them again.

5)     Consider at this point whether you will need to rent storage space or whether a neighbor or a friend will allow you to store these items in their home as filled boxes will accumulate quickly. A new storage idea has streamlined storage space in recent years, whereas you rent a container or a pod and store the items in this portable space for as long as you need to.  If you should rent this container space, do not store the entire container on your own property.  Ask a friend or a neighbor if you can store it there or ask the container company if you can store at their own facility.  You do not want to make your home look like a warehouse. Also, do not consider storing any packed items in a spare bedroom or in the basement of your own home as you would simply be de-cluttering one room and cluttering another.  All rooms should be clear of storage boxes, afterall you are selling a home and not a storage space.

6)     Clean, clean, clean….particularly bathrooms and kitchens.  No home will sell especially well with grit, mold, dirty tiles and floors. For as much as you will stage each room, the buyers’ eyes will focus on the dirt and not on the hard work you put into staging.  People remember dirt and grime and it would only remind them how much more work they would have to do when they moved in themselves.  If you need to re-grout a dirty tub, then you will need to make that effort. 

7)     Buyers make a determination of a home within 20 seconds of walking through the front door.  Make that experience memorable within that short period of time.  If you have an entryway, set up a table, with flowers, a small attractive bowl of expensive mints and add some potpourri somewhere in the area.  Scented candles offer a nice smell when you first walk in, so I use them often.  I often purchase scented candles at the dollar store or the day after a holiday when the retailers slash holiday item prices.  An expensive red Christmas candle can be picked up for half price the day after the holiday season and no one would know it was a holiday candle.  The same for Halloween…often orange, black, yellow and green scented candles go on sale after this event, so I stock up at that time and use those candles throughout the year.

If you have an entryway, open all the doors off the entry to make the space appear larger and brighter.

8)     Go from room-to-room and pack- up clutter.  Leave a small basket under the counter or in a closet with items you will need to use while you are still living there.  The only items on a bathroom counter should be a small bouquet of flowers, a bar of clean decorative soap in a clean soap dish and a clean hand towel.  Toothbrushes, toothpaste, shaving cream, medications and hair products should all be packed away under the counters or in places, which are not noticeable. 

9)     Go to the supermarket and purchase an inexpensive bouquet of either daisies or carnations.  You get many more flowers to work with in these arrangements than you would if you opted to spend money on roses or more expensive flowers.  Arrange the flowers in whiskey snifters, small vases, or, if you do not have either take a better drinking glass from your kitchen, tie a small ribbon around the base and fill that with water and a few daisies.  Use these arrangements randomly around the home but be sure to place at least one in each room.  Change flowers as needed but the daisies and carnations seem to last a long time even if you forget to add more water!  Dying flowers MUST be thrown out immediately; they make bad impression to visitors to your home. 

10)  Move out the bulky furniture and create little seating venues in your home with small tables and chairs.  For example, you normally have a large sectional in your TV room with a cocktail table and two side tables…however, you may also have a large window facing the backyard that is blocked by the sectional.  Remove pieces of the sectional to make the space appear larger.  Place the cocktail table and one end table near the sectional.  Find two chairs, which do not always have to match and place the other end table in front of the window with the 2^nd end table in between the chairs.  Add your bouquet of flowers, a small lamp and you have another seating area in the room.  Pull your curtains away from the window, tie back with decorative rope or ribbon and let the light shine in the room.  Add a bowl of lemons (I also like to use colored peppers) to the cocktail table for added color.  Find two pillows that DO match and place them on the chairs in front of the window to tie the room together.  If you do not have matching pillows, take two unmatching pillows and wrap matching pillow cases around the pills and knot in the center with a piece of ribbon.  This is an easy formula to pull together a room which works in every bedroom and common area in the home.

If you do not have a window to showcase, you may use a blank wall and situate the furniture as indicated above, adding two or three framed prints between the chairs and slightly overlapping the seating space to bring the eye toward the seating venue.

What Is a 1031 Exchange?

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Many people who sell an investment property believe that federal capital gains from that sale must always be handed over to the IRS.  This is not always the case.  IRS Code Section 1031 offers investors the opportunity to reinvest federal capital gains from a sale if you swap that property for another…and it does not always have to be for ‘like property’ either!  Instead, as an investor, you could have that money work for you rather than end up in the hands of the IRS. Further, you do not have to sell your property for the exact same type of property either!

The 1031 Code indicates that no gains or losses will be recognized on the exchange of any type of business use or investment property for any other business use or investment property.

So what does this mean?  How can this help you?

If you own a business or an investment property you should consider a 1031 exchange.   You would be able to defer 100% of both federal and state capital gains tax.  1031 Exchanges in essence become interest free loans; where the principal may increase through future exchanges allowing the Exchanger to never pay back, if the transactions are planned well.  Along with the guidance of an experienced realtor, www.michaeltrustrealty.com this can be one of the most profitable ventures you will ever enter into.

Are you apprehensive about the 1031 Exchanges?  Here are some interesting facts, which will make the decision easier.

1) At one time, exchanges were only done to switch like investment properties to the same person swapping for your own, but this is not the case anymore.  In fact, you can sell your own property to someone who does not have a relationship to the person from whom they are purchasing the replacement property.

2) It is important to know that like-properties once met the same, condo for condo, empty lot for empty lot but that is also no longer the case.  If you have invested your money in an empty lot but wish to exchange for an apartment building, this too is possible and again, no taxes would be paid for the sale of the vacant land when following the guidelines of the 1031 exchange. In fact, the owner of the empty lot can even sell that one lot and then purchase several others or just buy one and then sell others. Note, 1031 Exchanges only apply to investment properties and not residences.

3)  Many believe only investors of large commercial properties can utilize a 1031. One of the greatest features about a 1031 Exchange is that it applies to all investment properties, large and very small. 1031 Exchange works the same way for a corporation selling a large shopping mall as it would for an individual selling a single-family property used for rental or held for investment in a resort area.

4) Many believe 1031 Exchanges are very complicated and not worth investigating. Consider working with a qualified Realtor and Broker who can offer you professional advice and direction.  1031 Exchanges is a relatively smooth process and definitely worth considering but sound advice from an experienced realtor is the key to profitability.

5) The Exchanger can acquire a replacement property with greater income potential. For example, raw land can be sold to acquire income-producing property or a larger or more ideally located property.  A duplex rental property can be exchanged for a 4-family investment property offering greater income.

Should you wish to increase your buying flow due to greater cash flow, exchange investment or rental property for that with a greater income, acquire investment property that is easier to finance, or should you have the need to relocate or the desire to increase your current business or investment space for a larger area, the 1031 Exchange can accomplish any or all of these goals.

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Michael Trust is a native Angeleno having been born, raised, and educated in Los Angeles.  A homeowner himself, Michael is familiar with the challenges of buying, selling and owning real estate in the Greater Los Angeles area.

His background is unusual in Realtor® circles. With a baccalaureate degree from California State University, Long Beach, and a Master’s Degree in Management from the University of Southern California (USC), Michael offers 15-years of corporate management experience in Fortune 500 organizations, Michael Trust can help you look at your real estate transaction from a broader business perspective.

Not only is Michael a Realtor® but he is also a California Real Estate Broker/Officer. Many Realtors® work under the umbrella of a large real estate organization and are obliged to follow the dictates of that organization. As a Real Estate Broker, Michael does not have to answer to a large corporation. He is free to make decisions based entirely on your best interests.

As a member of the National Association of Realtors®, the California Association of Realtors®, the Southland Regional Association of Realtors® (CRISNET Multiple Listing Service), and the Simi Valley/Moorpark Association of Realtors®, as well as the Combined Los Angeles/Westside Multiple Listing Service, he keeps abreast of legal and market changes through daily communications from these organizations. Michael fully subscribes to and abides by the high ethical standards required of their members.  Michael is also a volunteer member of the Southland Regional Association's Multiple Listing Service Committee, and Regional User's Group Committee.

Michael and his Team specialize in residential, residential income, and commercial sale and lease properties. Michael and his Team are well versed in 1031 Exchanges as well.  Michael and his Team are backed up by a staff of assistants with specialties in marketing, transaction management, and general administrative support so that you can receive the best possible service.  Michael Trust Realty uses technology to the fullest to make your experience a smooth one. For more information, please contact Michael through www.michaeltrustrealty.com

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Posted at 9:49 AM, Jun. 16, 2006

Update on the status of the real estate market

Posted at 11:10 AM, Jun. 14, 2006

About Michael Trust Realty

Posted at 4:28 PM, Jun. 8, 2006