I think the staging made all the difference in the world. We had 12 other homes for sale on our street, several in our area (Copperfield) and we are the only house that sold. Can you believe it???!!!

Cindy Wood, BSc, RDMS

But for homeowners planning to list their property, the fall selling season is fast approaching and now is the time to start preparing – at a pace you control. Ron Sowden, co-founder of Vancouver-based Dekora Staging Inc., is no stranger to the challenges of preparing homes for sale, and he has certainly seen his share of home sellers rushing at the last minute to get things in order for an open house.;

Why sweat it? There is a better way.

“Take advantage of the longer days now and leisurely chip away at your list of improvements well before your home goes on the market,” Sowden said. “You’ll avoid much of the stress I see when home sellers scramble a day or two before their open house.”

Tackle the big items first and then turn your attention to the little touches that will make your home stand out from the competition in your area.

You are making improvements before listing your home for sale – right?

Some sellers may indeed have a home in pristine condition and with such tasteful elegance that it should grace the cover of a design magazine. The rest of us need to consider how our home is presented before we put it on the market.

Times have changed. The days of multiple offers on homes with clutter and pink walls are gone. Many homes with less offensive oversights, if one could call pink walls an oversight, now need a critical eye before they are listed for sale.

“A couple of years ago home sellers could get away with a lot,” says Sowden. “They had an advantage over buyers, if you will. Now there is more selection on the market and the competition among sellers is stronger than in the recent past. The need to present your home well [when selling] is certainly becoming more and more important.”

As a starting point, Sowden recommends having a design-conscious friend give you candid feedback on how your home looks.

Better yet, have a respected realtor visit your home well before your open house and ask their opinion. Another option is to contact a home staging company for a consultation. Also, tour a few open houses in your area and see how your home stacks up against the competition.

The key is to solicit candid feedback because the people closest to you may sugarcoat their true thoughts.

If you plan ahead and make the appropriate improvements then hopefully the sun will shine on your fall open house and you can relax at the cottage knowing you’ve done everything right to market your home.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

Competition.

As buyers increasingly have more choices, it’s critical home sellers consider how their property is being presented and how it stacks up against other similarly priced homes in the area.

“Typically it’s home buyers who study listing information and attend open houses, but we encourage home sellers to also work closely with their agents and conduct some basic competitive research prior to listing their home for sale,” says Ron Sowden of Dekora Home Staging.  “There is no better way to understand your competition than to research comparable listings and attend a few open houses in your area,” adds Sowden.

Of course most listing agents will provide an analysis of comparable sales, but the key is to also gathering current market information about listed homes rather than just past sales.

The next step in the process should involve a careful analysis of how your home compares with other local listings in terms of price, condition and presentation.  “Consider creating a simple ranking of listed homes and evaluate your property against the others from a competitive standpoint.  Also, solicit additional unbiased opinions to either validate or challenge your assessment,” says Ron Sowden of Dekora Home Staging.

Armed with competitive intelligence of this nature, home sellers gain a considerable advantage provided they take action on the information.  “To be successful, home sellers need to first ‘walk in a buyer’s shoes’ and then take the necessary steps to ensure their home shows at its best,” advises Sowden.

It sounds simple, but most busy families will need to hire the appropriate professionals to make the necessary enhancements.  A good place to start is the Shell Busey HouseSmart web page (www.housesmartcentre.com), which includes a qualified contractor referral network.  Real estate agents are also a great resource for other professionals like landscapers, home stagers and painters.

“Indentifying that improvements are needed prior to listing is a big first step, but once sellers commit to taking action there are plenty of folks who can help prioritize each task and ultimately maximize the appeal of a home,” says Sowden.  “And all that effort will go a long way when the house hits the market,” adds Ron Sowden of Dekora Home Staging.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

Hiring a qualified and professional real estate agent to market your property is a key ingredient to a success, but your agent must be armed with beautiful photography to capture the attention of potential buyers looking at your property for the first time.

Roger Brooks, one of Vancouver’s top architectural photographers, is the “go to” person for leading developers and agents looking to create stunning visuals to help market their properties.

“Photos need to be clear, well lit and show the interior at its best. Camera angle and composition are critical,” says Brooks. These photographic pointers may seem obvious to some, but it’s one thing to understand what’s needed at a conceptual level and another to possess the skills and equipment necessary to achieve outstanding photographic results.

As Ron Sowden of Dekora Home Staging points out, there are countless homes listed for sale in the Lower Mainland being marketed with less than appealing photos, or worse – none at all.

“We come across this all the time,” says Sowden. “Many times our team will complete a staging project only to find poorly lit or badly composed snapshots being used to market the property. We often recommend using professional photography, but a lot of sellers don’t fully realize the impact beautiful photography has in terms of attracting buyers.”

In this hyper-competitive real estate market, snapshots just don’t cut it when buyers are potentially trolling through dozens of listings in one sitting. On the other hand, beautifully photographed properties jump off the page, grab the attention of buyers and should ultimately compel them to arrange a showing with their agent.

Now, back to skills and equipment.

Considerable artistry and craft is needed to produce stunning architectural imagery. “Creating a mood by using lighting and choosing the time of day to shoot can help define the use of a room. For example, a master bedroom can be presented as subdued and relaxing if shot at dusk or in the evening. By using lighting creatively an appealing scene can be set,” says Brooks about the artistic thought process behind an effective shot.

A professional architectural photographer’s “tool kit” includes a long list of equipment that even most avid amateur photographers do not possess. Roger Brooks mentions “different specialty tilt and shift lenses, which will allow the perspective to be controlled. These lenses can be shifted either horizontally or vertically, which allows an image to be shot in two halves and then later ‘stitched’ together.”

What did he just say? The truth is that it really doesn’t matter because results are key not the process – at least from a home seller’s perspective.

If you are listing your home for sale, put away your snapshot camera and call a professional photographer because it might just be one of the most important calls you’ll ever make.

Roger Brooks abandoned a precarious existence as a salaried civil engineer with a large multi-national company for the security of being a freelance photographer. His images can be seen gracing the pages of Architectural Digest, Interiors Magazine and Western Living. He can be reached at www.rogerbrooks.ca, 604-880-4397.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

Nevertheless, this overwhelming array of colour options combined with a slew of tantalizing names leads many home owners to not only get confused, but often become unwitting victims of colour hype. And in the case of home sellers this can be a costly error.

Apparently, the latest paint colour trends revolve around what some have coined “lively” colours. I recently learned “lively” to mean, as one web site puts it, “pigment infused pastels” and “baby blues” or other similarly bold hues.

Warning: Do not use Kool-Aid-like colour palettes if you plan to sell your home.

Some of us love Kool-Aid and many of us do not (I’m in the “do not like” camp). By extension, the same logic holds true for extreme colours; and home sellers are well advised to keep this in mind when preparing their property for sale.

There is nothing wrong with Goa Sands, Trance and Irish Valley, each “lively” and unique paint colours in their own way, but a label should be prominently affixed that reads “Not for use in homes listed for sale”.

“The goal of every home seller should be to attract as many potential buyers as possible while minimizing the risk of turning any off because of highly personalized colour choices,” says Ron Sowden of Dekora Home Staging. “With the exception of carefully selected art and accessories, it’s critical for home sellers to use subdued, conservative and typically lighter earth tone colours when making pre-sale enhancements to a home,” adds Sowden.

For a couple of failsafe options, Sowden recommends Natural Linen (CC-90) for walls and Cloud White (CC-40) for trim, which are both by Benjamin Moore.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

As housing inventories rise, sales drop and buyers become more selective, leading real estate agents are advising home sellers to not only check their expectations in terms of price, but ensure their home or investment property stands out from the competition.  

With the real estate slowdown now in full swing across the Lower Mainland, hundreds of homes have been sitting on the market for 30, 60, 90 days and in some cases even a year or more.  Yet despite the seemingly endless barrage of negative news, homes are still selling and in many cases quickly. 

Why do some homes languish on the market and others sell?

It’s a simple question, but one home sellers often ignore or choose not to address because their desire to achieve a particular price outweighs their need to sell.  Sadly, in other cases it’s an unwillingness to come to terms with the realities of a fast changing market. 

Regardless, the answer to the question usually lies in a handful of factors and to a large extent they are controlled by sellers.

The first factor is price.   Pay attention to comparable sales in your area and only consider ones that have occurred recently.  We all love to project our dreams onto our neighbour’s selling price, but prices in the Lower Mainland are changing rapidly.  You may set yourself up for disappointment by using stale data to set your price – and data can be stale in a month. 

Most importantly, listen to the advice of your agent and avoid pressuring them to list your home at the price you want vs. what the current market will bear.  Set the price realistically for the first open house and you will improve your chances of generating interest and hopefully a sale. 

Second, working with a reputable agent you trust and respect is critical.  Check references and consider how other properties they have listed are being priced and marketed.  Also, the way agents market themselves often translates into how they market homes and with real estate, like any other product, it’s all about marketing.   

Lastly, pay close attention to how your home is being presented for sale because once your home goes on the market it’s in competition with all the other homes in your area and price range.  Start by asking the opinion of your agent and then contact a professional home staging company for a second opinion.  Most home staging companies offer a wide range of services from consultations to other enhancements like cleaning, de-cluttering, painting, landscaping and changing décor using rental furnishings, art, lighting and accessories.  It is crucial that prospective buyers have a good first impression of your home because often you only get one chance.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

Is your home feeling a little tired, dowdy, or just not finding its style groove?  Many of us find ourselves in the dilemma of trying to pull together a décor look to combine a few favourite pieces with family heirlooms, hand-me-downs, blended collections of furniture and ‘stuff,’ and maybe a few flea market treasures scattered in.  The result can be an unresolved jumble.  You don’t want to get rid of stuff you love (or stuff your loved ones cannot part with!) but how do you combine it all in a way that looks good – and not like a design traffic accident?

Don’t despair!  It can be done, and when done well, it can look fabulous, says Susan Mackay of Dekora. “Putting together a great room style doesn’t mean that everything needs to match, or be expensive, or share the same time period, style or quality,” explains Mackay. “When staging homes for our customers, we are constantly faced with the challenge of working with an existing combination of furniture and personal contents that have to be made to ‘sing’ together in order to market the home to prospective purchasers. We do it all the time, and so can you, especially if you keep a few design principles in mind.”

Mackay recalls staging a home which featured some beautiful heirloom antiques, but which felt overly fussy and museum-like.”Our designers transformed the space by pairing the homeowner’s gorgeous antique dining chairs with a classic modern steel and glass table,” she says. “We also used other clean-lined modern furnishing and decor pieces to create unexpected contrasts that made the whole space come alive.” Mackay advises to look for ways to mix pieces that share certain qualities – such as simple, clean lines – or mix things that completely contrasting. “For example, antiques with their patina of time and inherent flaws can be a fantastic contrast with spare, modern pieces of furniture, lighting or artwork,” she says.

“One key is to find the ‘yin and yang relationships’ between objects so that they complement one another, whether because of similarities or differences,” Mackay adds. Try pairing something fine and refined with something funky like a weather-beaten found object. Don’t be afraid to mix up colours, textures, styles and other qualities. Another tactic is to group similar items. If your mate is passionate about that collection of hand-whittled miniature duck decoys, gather some of them together and make it a feature – don’t scatter them at random. 

“It’s like planning a great dinner party,” says Mackay. “You want to invite an interesting assortment into your home to create a great vibe and some stimulating conversation.” 

It’s all in the mix.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

Makes sense.

The marketing folks at Pottery Barn certainly appreciate the psychology of buying behavior among consumers and how effective merchandising first attracts customers and then triggers buying impulses. Pottery Barn, like most established retailers, focuses on merchandising for good reason – it increases sales.

Armed with tools like foot traffic analysis software networked with in-store cameras and real time sales reporting, many large retailers now have the ability to precisely quantify the effectiveness of their merchandising initiatives – product placement, store layout, displays etc.

While not equipped with the same advanced technologies or refined research techniques, merchants and shopkeepers during ancient times had an innate understanding of merchandising. They often employed what were strikingly similar merchandising techniques to their modern day counterparts.

These early retailers pioneered a variety of simple yet effective methods to first attract foot traffic and most importantly convert this traffic into sales. In fact, some of the most common retail merchandising techniques seen today originated in the bustling markets of ancient Rome, which acted as an early “Petri dish” of consumer behavior.

Around the world and across millennia product merchandising continues to be used by businesses in every industry regardless of product, price point or target market. The reason? A handsome return on investment.

And your home, when listed for sale, is no different.

Prior to working as a senior stager at Dekora, Tracey Mills spent years in retail merchandizing for companies like Mondi and Holt Renfrew. “It was a natural transition for me to go from merchandizing product for retailers to merchandizing properties for sale,” said Mills. “Do you see how all the colours in Pottery Barn’s display work harmoniously together? This is no accident. It’s strategic and intended to capture the attention of customers. It creates a mood customers want to see in their own lives,” added Mills as she strolled through the store.

“What most people often don’t realize is that once their home goes on the market it effectively becomes a product. Ultimately, a home seller is no different than any other retailer. Sure, it ‘feels’ different because of emotion and sentiment, but when it comes down to it the home owner is selling to consumers just like a retailer,” said Mills.

“To increase the odds of a fast and profitable sale home owners have to approach their home like a retailer would their storefront. They need to merchandise,” added Mills.

Sounds simple, but without access to cameras and foot traffic analysis software like the retail giants how is a home owner to compete with the flood of housing inventory seen lately?

Of course Mills’ first suggestion is to consult with a home staging professional, but there are also few seasonal things you can do that just might make the difference when selling. After all, most retailers refresh their store displays each season and none of us wear surf shorts in December.

Mills says the key to seasonal enhancements when selling is to keep it subtle and do not go overboard.

Fall Season Selling Tips

• Incorporate organic elements such as twigs, branches, leaves, berries, gourds, and fruit (apples, pears) etc. into table decor and displays. Use in coloured glass vases, woven trays and wooden bowls.

• Replace cool summer fabrics (cotton, linen) with cozy wool and chenille in toss pillows, throws, area rugs and bedding.

• Use rich, warm autumnal colours of nature to create a cohesive look throughout your home.

• Pay attention to outdoor spaces by replacing summer flowers with fall selections.

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.

Selected from thousands of submissions, the room is re-created twice in studio with the teams working side-by-side in a race against the clock.  Showdown is a high pressure, fast-paced competition and if any of you have seen Matthew on HGTV’s The Stagers, you already know that he will be in his element.

Matthew Finlason is a designer at Vancouver based Dekora Home Staging Inc., the company featured on The Stagers.  Broadcast weekly in Canada and the U.S. to over 95 million homes, The Stagers goes behind the scenes at Dekora and taps into the rapidly growing world of home staging. 

Q.  How do you define home staging?

A.  Essentially, staging is merchandizing a home for sale.  It involves looking at all the various aesthetic elements people consider in a home when buying and then working within the home sellers budget to make sure those elements are appealing to the target buyers.  Sometimes this simply means cleaning and de-cluttering, but other times we’ll paint, landscape, do minor repairs and bring in rental furnishings, art and accessories.  Ultimately, the goal is to maximize the value of the home and speed the sale.

Q.  How is designing on-camera different than off-camera?

A.  I think the biggest challenge is juggling all the different schedules so the project comes off seamlessly and on budget. We work with the home seller, realtor, TV production crews, Dekora’s moving teams, assistants and contractors to name a few. Things often get hairy on camera, but we pull it off in time for the open house.

Q.  What are the top three things home sellers should remember?

A.  Choose a great realtor, list at a competitive price and stage your home. It’s really that simple.  In any market these three principles endure, but in this new challenging market we’re facing it’s even more important.  It’s no longer a seller’s market so you need this three-pronged approach to maximize your chances of success.

Q.  This Showdown competition for HGTV sounds like fun.  Can you tell us more about it?

A.  You’ll have to tune in to see the celebrity I’m teamed up with, but it’s going to be a fun event and great exposure for The Stagers’ second season.  Each team has a $5,000 budget and the show is filmed over four hours, which is then edited down to one hour. It’s not much time to completely transform a room and the limited budget adds another degree of difficulty.  I’m really looking forward to the challenge and hope my experience with the pressures of staging will help with this competition.   

For a complete list of Dekora’s Top 10 Home Staging & Curb Appeal Tips e-mail us.