Showhomes St. Petersburg

Showhomes is a national franchise and we train new Home Stagers often. One of my favorite parts of training is a field exercize that clearly demonstrates the difference in a vacant home for sale and a home that is both occupied and fully staged. Our company's success is based on the premise that vacant homes are much harder to sell, take much longer to sell and sell for far less money.

For this exercise, we used two homes for sale in a suburb north of Nashville. Both homes are in the same neighborhood, are priced the same and have been on the market for the same amount of time. We carried a group of people through both houses and recorded their feedback from both homes:

House #1: vacant house:

Here is the positive and negative feedback from 5 people who visited this home:

Negative Feedback	Positive Feedback
weeds in planter	Lot of space
dark – lighting	Master bath big
temp cold, uncomfortable	Well maintained
No color	Tray ceilings nice
Inconsistent shine of wood floor	Bonus room nice and private
Sink dirty	Like high finish in garage
no fridge	like recessed stair lights
portable chairs	Good windows and lighting fixtures
empty mantle	Solid house
Tub dirty	Good looking house
shower missing enclosure	high ceilings nice
house seemed not finished	wood floor nice
Misc parts on counters
Carpet dirty. Dusty
windows have dead bugs
dirty windows
Toilets not clean
Large empty loft room
No place to sit
No window coverings – no privacy
Too close to neighbors
Front yard not kept
Lot of leaves
no curtains – feels colder
To big – get lost
Unfinished room at top of stairs
Hard to visualize space
smells like paint
Paint peeling on back door jamb
spiderwebs creepy
scrap of carpet for welcome mat
Storage by fridge left over
Cold and dark
Echo on floor
Echo on marble made subfloor seem hollow or poorly built
Granite didn’t match house – colors don’t match
dead leaves in front
dust bunnies on floor
low outlets framed awkward – looked like substandard building
dead grass
wood floor to marble floor uneven
House empty
Master tub too small
shower odd
scratched wood floor in study
lights out
living room and kitchen eating area small
Pink tint odd

Here is the home staged by Showhomes with a live-in Home Stager:

Here is the positive and negative feedback from the same people:

Negative Feedback	Positive Feedback
too many personal photos	wel lit
	clean
	homey feel – warm
	comfortable
	very nice colors – eye catchy
	great furniture
	felt luxirous
	upstairs bedroom nice as master
	big house – good space
	felt more usable, easier to live in
	music and fans
	full of life
	really liked it – cozy
	very welcoming
	music makes great impression
	sitting area in master great
	very funstional house
	great floorplan
	keeping room – great space
	extra family room – bonuns room huge
	nice playroom
	smells nice
	closets really nice
	garage not cluttered
	food in fridge
	nice and clean home
	curb appeal great
	wreath on door
	seems like a model
	felt like a perfect model home
	linens like a spa
	patio nice
	staging really great
	master bedroom awesome
	music really helpful
	clean garage
	warm and very clean
	woman’s touch
	holiday decorations tasteful
	feels like a great family house
	live plants look great

Look at them side by side and it’s obvious which home is going to sell faster!

In a pricing survey, all 5 said they preferred the staged home and if they were to put in an offer would start at 5-10% below list price and would all go up to list price to get the home. Several stated they would ‘be embarrassed to low-ball the owner since the home was so well cared for.”

The vacant home, on the other hand, did poorly on the pricing survey. Even though the homes were comparable in most ways, the viewers said they would submit a low-ball offer starting at 70% of the list price and would only go up to 75%.

What do you think?

Thomas Scott

www.showhomes.com

Dividing the spaces in a small place

 

It's an age-old problem with small houses: how do you make the spaces look larger and more functional so the spaces don't seem so SMALL??

This problem is even tougher in a condo where all the spaces are small. Cindy Montgomery in our Showhomes Minneapolis office emailed me these photos to explain how she divides up small spaces and uses small-footprint furniture to enlarge a room:

I believe that the more activites a buyer can see themselves doing in a space, large or small, the more attracive the home becomes. Great job, Cindy!

Thomas Scott

www.showhomes.com

Innovative Home Staging is Key to Home Sales in Down Market

 

With a $569,000 Tampa home sitting on the market for a year and a half and no signs of a sale, Tracy Truitt was a disheartened Realtor looking for a new approach that would help her sell her listing.

Truitt, a Realtor with Century 21 Elite in Tampa, discovered Showhomes, a pioneer in the home staging industry, and its unique spin on traditional home staging: the nationally franchised company finds people to live in and help stage vacant homes so that they show better and sell faster. Given the declining real estate market, mansions and just about every other type of home are difficult to sell.

Showhomes staged Truitt’s home and it sold in eight days.

“I had an almost full price offer within a week of Showhomes’ staging, and a 25 percent higher offer than the two offers that had come in previously to the home being staged,” Truitt says.

Showhomes Tampa owner Linda Saavedra says Truitt’s experience isn’t a fluke.

Saavedra’s magnificently staged homes are selling in a fraction of the time most homes are taking to sell. So are homes all over the country staged with Showhomes’ one-of-a-kind system. A typical $850,000 home in Florida is taking well over a year to sell in today’s market and the average time it has taken Showhomes to sell these homes is a staggering 132 days.

“Recently we’ve had six major success stories with homes that have lingered on the market for over a year,” she says. “Three homes sold within 35 days and two others were contracted within seven days of staging. The home that sold in 8 days has been on the market for over two years and the sale price was 20 percent more than the offers they received when the home was vacant.”

“Our approach is working when nothing else is,” says Thomas Scott, VP of operations at the Nashville-based corporate headquarters of Showhomes. “We are experiencing similar home sales results in southern California, the Midwest and Northeast. Despite the glut of inventory, there are buyers in the market and they are choosing to purchase homes we have staged.”

Tracy Truitt, the frustrated Realtor, can’t believe it took her so long to use Showhomes, “Showhomes’ results speak for themselves.”

For franchise opportunities and more information, please visit www.showhomes.com .

The Jacksonville Business Journal ran an article on Showhomes today and how we are doing more and more bank business nationwide. For many banks, the type of staging we provide fits their needs. Showhomes got its start doing bank owned homes in the 1980s and we contiue today. Take a look:

Heritage Bank Senior Vice President Greg Totten was a skeptic when he decided to try using a home staging company to sell a bank-owned property that had been on the market in Queens Harbour for nearly a year at $2 million.

After a home manager moved in and staged the 6,000-square-foot home, the number of showings increased as well as the dollar amount of the offers before it went under contract in September to sell for $1.5 million. Totten’s now a believer in home staging.

Home stagers specialize in furnishing and decorating vacant homes to make them look lived-in for prospective buyers. Although the industry started as an indirect result of the savings and loan crisis in the mid-1980s when lenders needed help selling a glut of foreclosed homes, since then most homes have been staged for homeowners — until now.

“Banks are looking to try to get the most from the homes they now have,” said Totten, who is the branch manager at the Ponte Vedra Beach branch of Heritage Bank. “We came out, over all, I think pretty well.”

In the last three to four months Showhomes franchise owners Jim and Kaye Biby said they’ve seen an increasing interest from lenders looking for help to sell some of the homes they’ve had to foreclose on. The Queens Harbour home was the first foreclosed home the Bibys helped sell with a home manager who actually lived on site during the staging process. They’ve already signed a contract with a regional bank, which preferred not to be named, to help sell one, maybe two foreclosed homes and is negotiating a contract with a third.

Kaye Biby, Showhomes Jacksonville

The Bibys have also staged a short sale home in Palencia that sold in 21 days in March and have signed a contract to stage another short sale in the World Golf Village.

The Bibys say they think lenders are becoming more interested in their staged properties, which typically include live-in home managers, because it reduces the bank’s overhead.

Even though bank-owned home staging is growing, the Bibys expect it to remain a small portion of their overall portfolio. So far this year, the franchise has helped sell 17 homes for a total value of $16 million compared with 21 homes for a total value of $21 million in 2008. Only one of the homes sold so far this year was a foreclosure and one was a short sale. They had no foreclosures or short sales last year.

In the past most banks maintained minimal upkeep on foreclosed homes, often selling them as is. Lynn Vitel, broker at Vitel Realty Group of Keller Williams Realty, said now with competition stiff in the residential real estate market, banks too are looking for a competitive edge.

“Staging means everything. It lets people visualize what the rooms are,” Vitel said. “The banks are having to smarten up.”

Sandy Steiner, an agent with Re/Max Specialists who used Showhomes to stage a property that was not a owned by a lender, said she expects that as market values continue to decline more lenders will reach out to home stagers.

“Banks are taking on a larger responsibility,” Steiner said. “They don’t want to be blamed for that one foreclosed property bringing down the property value for the whole neighborhood.”

Christy McCarthy, owner of Jacksonville-based Interiors Revitalized, said that while she hasn’t actually staged any lender-owned properties yet, she too has noticed the interest, and she understands why.

“It’s crucial to get these homes back in top-dollar condition so they don’t lose any more money,” McCarthy said.

 

Thomas Scott, Showhomes

Franchise Information

Donne Muelver, owner of Showhomes Southeast Wisconson, emailed me this excellent testimonial from a listing Realtor on a home we just staged and sold:

Hi Donna,

I was very impressed with Showhomes!  After six months on the market, our sellers were relocating and needed to have their home staged and decided to go with Showhomes.  We were thrilled to receive two offers within three weeks of the staging!  Donna's professionalism and expertise made the entire process seamless.   I would highly recommend Showhomes, and encourage Realtors to contact Donna for details on this very innovative and unique way to help sellers with a vacant home.

Sincerely,

Sue Nikolic ABR

Take a look at Donna's work:

Great work and yet another reason you should stage a home in today's market. You DO have to win the beauty contest in today's market to sell a home!

Thomas Scott, www.showhomes.com

We're recruiting

On a field visit to Tampa where Showhomes has three locations, I was able to view this $1 million dollar in-fill new contruction home in South Tampa. This 3-story home has a lot to offer and looks amazing now that it is staged:

We've had a really successful run of home sales this year, far outstripping the local market conditions. In Florida and especially in Jacksonville and Tampa, we've sold over 40 homes with an average list price of $816,000. These homes have been on the market for an average of more than a year before we stage them (they are all vacant) and we've been able to turn them around in  an average of 132 days.

Those are great numbers for the luxury market theses days - there are few buyers and far too many homes for sale. This segment of the market is not seeing the short-lived spikes the lower end segments are seeing becuase the FHA mortgages and first-time buyer credits don't apply.

Great work!

Thomas Scott, www.showhomes.com

We're recuiting!

 

At Showhomes, we stage all types of homes. Some are amazing, beautiful homes that look stunning when staged and some are, ummm - more challenging?

We strive to make every home we stage look amazing. Some just take more work. At our training class last week in Nashville we deconstructed an already staged home and spent a day putting it back together:

This $800k hilltop tudor home was built about 20 years ago. The home has amazing views and state of the art fixtures for its age. Here's the main room our class had to work with and as you can see, it's a bit of sage overload:

The carpet and walls are green. The light fixtures are green. When this room is empty, it is just plain green! How do you tone down the mono-chromatic colors? With the 2-story wall of windows, how do you use the fireplace? making it worse, the traffic pattern runs right through the middle of the room.

After moving couches and chairs all over the room, our class settled on what I think is the right way to stage this room:

 

They used the fireplace as the focal point, pulled the furniture off the walls, made it so everyone could reach the coffee table (a must for good conversation groups) and used the hearth as additional seating. The traffic pattern goes around the grouping, not through it and there are large accesories to make the room pop.

When you add in lamps and soften the lighting, the room isn't nearly as green. After staging the room, we noticed that everyone wanted to plop down on the couch or in a chair - the room went from cold and green to warm and comfortable.

Thomas Scott, Showhomes

www.showhomes.com

Franchise Information