Lofts, condos and houses all look better and sell faster when they are given the proper presentation. This is even more true for a plain box like a concrete industrial style loft condominium unit. #home #staging
Most lofts have some nice features and large windows, but they rely on a designer’s touch to really maximize their aesthetic potential — and selling price. Real estate staging has been around for a long time, but many home sellers still do not take full advantage of the power of professional presentation. The reason? There’s remarkably little information on how cost-effective and time-efficient that home staging is. This article will help address that issues by giving insights from experienced interior designer and overall art guru, Brother Andy. #tips #realestate #selling
WALK-THROUGH TOUR VIDEOS: BEFORE STAGING | AFTER STAGING
Staging is profitable. This is especially true for luxury lofts and condos over $300,000. To get more on the ROI of staging, and why it makes homes sell faster and easier, here’s the highly anticipated conversation, along with some before and after photos:
Brother Andy Home Staging Interview with Corey Chambers
Corey Chambers: Hello! I’m real estate agent, Corey Chambers — Your Home Sold GUARANTEED, or I’ll Buy It*. I’m speaking with artist Brother Andy, who recently staged a home I represent as a real estate agent. His staging work was a large part of a successful marketing plan. How do you approach staging a home?
Brother Andy: Whenever you’re dealing with sales of any kind, when you’re dealing with people’s homes (a big investment), you’re talking about iconic, abstract languages — family, ownership, pride, even “sexy”. You’re talking about dealing with stereotypes which can quickly be recognized and translated into “want”. You’re taking full advantage of the opportunities which are already present such as location, motivations to sell, or the personal needs of a buyer.
You’re featuring the best aspects of a place and you’re downplaying the things that aren’t as valuable or as necessary for the sales to happen. So, there are some basic principles of the things people like and are attracted to. One of them being, which most people don’t think about: if something feels out of place, then people will not be attracted to it. Staging to suit people’s expectations is about color and shape and light and functionality, cleanliness — all of the things that make a person attractive is exactly the same kind of things that make a house attractive to a potential buyer.
Corey Chambers: Let’s get into the specifics of this particular case study of Durango (the house represented in Winchester, California). You had to make a cluttered house look pretty and the seller immediately got multiple offers right after your staging. What were the other issues you encountered with the house?
Brother Andy: Well, like any home, what you want to say to buyers is that the property itself is valuable. That there is, underneath, however the person selling has chosen to decorate, however the existing lifestyle, the property itself is functional and clean and what you’re offering is true. That, underneath all the facade of the seller’s lifestyle, was a good roof, good plumbing, good electrical. Then, the next step from that is to say, “Okay. You, as the buyer, could easily plug in this lifestyle or that lifestyle of your choice.” And in the Winchester area, you look at the location. You’re looking at a potential buyer who would come in there and expect what? What kind of person would they be? In this particular case, it’s not someone from Beverly Hills. It’s also not somebody from the Bowery, so you’re going for the Middle Class, middle marketing, their ability to pay for certain things, so you don’t want to oversell it. You don’t want to under-sell it.
What do you want to do is to come in and make the house look practical, functional, and livable so the buyer can come in and put their stamp on the place to make it their own home. We make their potential lifestyle into this affordable place, into this market. In this particular case, the house had good flooring and you want to make sure that they can see the tile and you can see the layout, and that it is perfect for the kinds of people who live in that area, giving the potential buyer no reason to look elsewhere. A lot of times in staging, it’s great looking, but no one would actually live that way. It’s phoney and buyers can sense that and I try to make my staging “organic” by using existing materials, which was another challenge. In this particular case, there was no budget to buy anything. I had to just use what was there, so the drama of it came out of actually practical living, utilizing natural light.
Corey Chambers: What was interesting was to see if you could take all the stuff they have in there, which was a lot of mediocre stuff, and see if you can make it look more than mediocre. And you did. You somehow managed to find the jewels, the prime perfect pieces to decorate the house.
Brother Andy: One of the many things I learned several years ago doing visual display for stores is that, when you have groupings of things, it catches your eye; it makes sense to your eye. The human mind tries to find patterns. If you have things that are alike or things that contrast, you stick them together. In this particular case, I scoured the entire house and found everything that looked like it was art deco and I put those together. I found everything that looked like it had French influence and put those together. If you have a particularly small space, a lot of people would think you want to strip it down, which makes the space feel sterile.
What you want to do is have groupings of things in threes and fives and sevens. If you have things that are of similar color, they blend together. They give a sense of balance and peace — where otherwise, people have a tendency to do things like take the best things that they own and put them away because they’re too good to use or too good to be out where they could get broken. But it’s actually the opposite when you’re trying to sell a house. You want to put on your best jewelry. You want to put on your best coat. You want to put on your nice shoes. You want to take out the things that are distracting, things that are not enhancing the situation, and get rid of them. Put them aside. That’s what you put in the closet: clutter.One of the things people love being on a vacation and why they really enjoy air-bnbs and hotels — it’s because there isn’t a lot of clutter. Some times staging is as simple as going in to the bathroom and you’re seeing cleaning wands, toilet paper, plungers. All these things subconsciously are telling you that the place is dirty, that it’s maintenance. Everyone does that. It’s true. But by taking those items away, you’re shifting the focus. You will downplay the ordinary and it’s not a lie. It’s just saying, “Wait a minute… Here’s the bathtub where you can relax and enjoy hot water”, and just redirecting what the purpose of the room is for. And that is done very simply, without spending money.
Corey Chambers: You’ve succeeded brilliantly in solving a huge challenge — the living room — because the living room was a little bit bigger than what a living room needs to be. And the way that you handled that… Can you explain how that challenged you and how you solved it, including the fireplace as well?
Brother Andy: When you’re staging a home to sell, you’re actually presenting it as though it’s little stories, the house becomes a narrative, each room has a story, as though the house was a stage, so that when you open the door to the bedroom, when you come into the bedroom area, the bed needs to be in a place that makes sense, and that the potential buyers can see it at the best vantage. And that concept is an anchor point. A front room with the fireplace is an anchor point. As a staging expert, you’re building off of something and either there’s a clear path there the viewer can come in and be a part of and see it or there’s something blocking it.
For instance, in the front of the house. If there’s a tree or shrub that’s between the curb and the front door, it becomes a psychological block. When I see something, like in the Winchester house, here’s a fireplace on an angle to the main part of the room. Do I feature it or do I downplay it? I’m looking at the space overall, relationships to foot traffic and windows. Instead of lining all the furniture up against the walls, which would then create this huge blank space in the middle, what I wanted to do was a reveal to the viewer. Your eye follows the room around. The room was built to the right, so I made sure there that the furniture went to the right in placement, free-floating in the middle of the room. What you’re showing potential buyers is this story of: Here you could sit at the by the fireplace and read a book. Here’s where you could watch TV. The room was L-shaped to the right. Instead of lining the furniture up against the wall, which most people would do, or having one group on one corner and another group next to the fireplace (which is what the owners of the house did) creating this discord, what I did is move the things towards the middle of the room at an angle so your eye naturally follows the curve around to the right.Another example of what most people would not think of: the scale of things. If you have big couches, sometimes it’s good to put them in a bedroom so that smaller room looks like it’s cozy, more intimate. Even though you’re selling square footage, it’s also the impression that you’re giving of being sexy and relaxing. You are marketing the lifestyle that you’re plugging into it. At the Winchester House, it was a challenge because there wasn’t a lot of furniture that was to the scale needed. There wasn’t a clear layout. I just went with furniture placement as though there was an obvious layout and built off of the fireplace on an angle. And that’s a very odd thing for most people to do. It’s odd that they even built the fireplace that way. I used it to an advantage instead of a disadvantage. | ArtistBrotherAndy.com
Corey Chambers: Anything else that was challenging or interesting about the interior design staging process for the Winchester house?
Brother Andy: Mostly there were cosmetic needs like painting touch-ups, but you couldn’t see that because of the clutter and because of a particular lifestyle, a particular taste. This is very difficult for most sellers to understand — that it isn’t personal and there are reasons for these things needing to be changed and they’re hard to say what they even are because it’s visceral. It’s an emotional response to these things. You may think it’s fantastic to have all of this stuff on your refrigerator reminding you of your life and your events, but that’s telling a potential buyer (who can’t see the refrigerator they are buying) you aren’t paying attention to details, are lazy, not organized, and the potential buyers begins to questions plumbing, the roof, the electrical. The Winchester house is a great example of selling the building itself but you couldn’t see it and what you saw looked as though it smelled bad. The house could be a really nice home, but the owners didn’t really use it to its advantage. They didn’t use the space as well as they could have.
Corey Chambers: This is a probate sale. Now that it looks so much better and happier now, do you think that, if you would have been hired as the interior designer to do something similar while the owner was still alive, he would have been happy and maybe might have a reason to live and still be alive today?
Brother Andy: Perhaps. But there is the inevitable resistance factor. You know you want to present things in the best possible way. You want to make them look as though they’re pleasant and clean, etc. Going to somebody and saying, “Your property looks dirty…” No. But if the stager says, “Oh, look. Here are ten other people who have benefited from these ideas and you could as well…”, then staging becomes their choice. He may still not have chosen to do it initially, but he probably would have been glad at the end because when you’re getting above asking price, that’s all the justification you need. That’s just the way it is. Staging works. | Brother Andy WebsiteCorey Chambers: Now, let’s talk about success. This place received no offers and then immediately after your interior decorating, it got multiple offers right away. Then, the last property that you staged before was valued at about $480,000 and sold for around $620,000.
Brother Andy: It’s been my experience that staging always does better. A blank house will get you a certain amount of money and a certain amount of response. A house that’s REALLY decorated? You’ll probably get your money, but it’s harder to see it. It starts being about the stuff in the house instead of the building itself. Staging is an art form. It is a very specific advertising or marketing tool. I have never even heard of a case where a stager has cost anybody money in sales. The benefits far outweigh whatever hassles and confusion or invasion feeling that would come out of it.
Corey Chambers: In the previous case, the profit for the seller, because of their staging, was about $150,000. That’s a good reason to put up with a little bit of hassle. And in this case (the Winchester house), it might have been the difference between not selling the house or selling the house for $315,000 or more.
Brother Andy: It may sell. Maybe it will get your asking price, but it would take so much longer. Maybe. For the seller, it really boils down to: What is your message? Who are you saying it to? What do you want them to do? How much are you willing to do to make that happen? You could just say, “Property As Is,” and then you get what you get. You have to accept that.
Corey Chambers: Well, people need to know how profitable that it’s going to be. If they’re gaining $150,000 to $315,000 from your staging, are you charging about $75,000 for your staging?
Brother Andy: I would think it’s up to the million dollar homes where you’d go that high for a stager. That’s a lot of space they’re having to make sense of. You’re having to fill. One of the aspects of all of this that sellers really don’t pay enough attention to is the photography or the video. Sellers see it as a necessary expense, but just barely. If potential buyers can’t see the house and what they do see is bad, then you are wasting your time. You’re basically telling people, “I don’t care enough about it, even take a good picture.” It shouldn’t just be up to the real estate professionals to provide all of the good records of what you’re presenting. Part of what I offer is the pictures in conjunction with the staging. There’s a concept behind it all that’s cohesive. In this case, it was a probate. That word is usually is kind of a red flag to buyers. But if the marketing can tell them, “Oh, this is waiting for you. If you’re willing to put up with the lengthier process, then you’re going to have a really great place.” Buyers are more likely willing to do that.
Corey Chambers: My calculations, for people who are wondering what’s the return is, I’ve averaged it to be tenfold return on investment from having staging done by Brother Andy. That is: a $300,000 property can anticipate an extra $30,000 for when Brother Andy does the interior design staging.
Brother Andy: Staging is exciting because it’s simple and it works. Staging makes money in a practical way. It’s fun and it makes people happy. Transformations always appear to have an element of magic involved.
To reach Brother Andy with questions or to request a free consultation, email him andy@laloftblog.com or visit ArtistBrotherAndy.com
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Copyright © This free information provided courtesy L.A. Loft Blog and LAcondoInfo.com with information provided by Corey Chambers, Realty Source Inc, BRE#01889449 We are not associated with the homeowner’s association or developer. For more information, contact (213) 880-9910 or visit LAcondoInfo.com Licensed in California. All information provided is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed and should be independently verified. Properties subject to prior sale or rental. This is not a solicitation if buyer or seller is already under contract with another broker.
