Episode 15: The Best of Staging and Home Prep

Scott Williams: Sweet Home Santa Barbara where the skies are so blue. Sweet Home, Santa Barbara, what’s worked for me can work for you.

Jonathan Robinson: Hi friends. Welcome back to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Robinson and I’m with my friend and realtor Scott Williams. Well, welcome back Scott. In previous episodes, you’ve talked a lot about getting a home ready for sale, but we wanted to put a lot of your best ideas, critical ideas in one episode called The Best of Staging and Home Prep. So, you’re going to cover a lot of stuff rather quickly today. But when you think of staging and home prep, what does every seller need to know for sure?

Scott Williams: Well, there’s always three really greatest hits, their color, bark, and staging. Those are the things that every seller ought to do.

Jonathan: Okay. Color, meaning the color of the house, the color of the door where we are talking about?

Scott: Yeah, the color of the house, the door, the paint, the inside, outside paint. Paint just makes enormous difference in a house. To not paint a house before you put it up for sale, is boy, you really got to think. If things need to look good, or you need to just decide, you’re going to go a different road. But if you’re going to fix it up, you got to do the color.

Jonathan: And the second thing you said was what?

Scott: Bark. Bark mulch. It’s sort of like the paint on your landscape. You’re covering up all the dirt. No dirt should be showing. It all needs to be covered up between all the plants. And if you don’t want to plant more plants because that cost money, it’s less expensive to bark or mulch the yard and it gives such a finished look.

Jonathan: And these things are easy to do and they don’t cost much, which is nice.

Scott: They don’t cost much. They’re easy to do. They always work.

Jonathan: And I would imagine they have an enormous return on investment?

Scott: Yeah, they make… This is your first impression. This is the banger, the zing in the first impression.

Jonathan: And what was the third thing you mentioned?

Scott: Staging. Now we use professional stagers and I highly recommend professional stagers but at the very least a professional stager should walk through your house and there should be a discussion between the homeowner and the realtor and the stager on what things the owner can do to arrange their own furniture to make the place look most attractive. But we use these stagers often times and people will even move out of their houses and let the stagers have at it and do their thing, because it produces such a high profit.

Jonathan: And of course, you have to pay such people a fair amount of money for that?

Scott: Yes, but fair amount of money is only a relative term. If you spend five thousand dollars and make fifty thousand dollars, it’s 45 thousand dollars of profit. I’m sorry, that does not seem like a very big expense to me.

Jonathan: That’s a fair amount of money. That’s a lot of money.

Scott: You’re getting it.

Jonathan: Yes.

Scott: This is exactly… And that’s an inexpensive home. We can double or triple those numbers with a multi-million-dollar home in Montecito.

Jonathan: Wow, that’s amazing. What percentage of the people that you deal with know all this stuff? Or is like new information for a lot of them?

Scott: Well, people have seen this, if they’ve been tuned into television programs like home improvement shows. But it’s really only in the last 15 years that this has come into strong prominence in the marketplace. But prior to that, these things weren’t even talked about.

Jonathan: And it makes a huge difference too. So, what are some things you can do in terms of like smell or color around the house that can make a simple thing that would make a big difference?

Scott: Well, we have a saying in real estate if you can smell it, it’s hard to sell it. And there’s a lot of truth in that. This gets into people’s pets. It gets into food smells. Occasionally, we’ll have really elderly people where there were just human habitation smells were very strong in a home. Tobacco. These can make a real difference and we want to try to mask all of those things and there’s a few tricks of the trade and if you have those exact situations, then we’ll get into a conversation about what’s best to do in each one of those.

Jonathan: And when I bought my house a few years ago, there was a lot of flowers everywhere and it’s been, that’s a trade secret as well.

Scott: That’s true. We oftentimes will put the flowers near the front door, temporary yellow, we’ve referred to that. You want to burst of yellow color right at the front door. And if you’re living in your home, you can do that. If it’s vacant, you won’t be able to manage that quite so well.

Jonathan: Yeah. And there’s things like inspections, how do you handle that when you’re thinking of selling your house?

Scott: Well, it’s usually to the sellers benefit to inspect their home and provide the inspections to the buyer so that the seller knows what they’re selling, and the buyer knows what they’re buying. And every home may have specialized inspections that they need, whether it would be a foundation or a roof or the pipes or wires, the plumbing, the heating systems, all of these may need inspections and we have to get into discussions about how many of these to do. But it usually is a way for the seller to save having the buyer asked them for money and to know what they’re really putting on the market.

Jonathan: And one issue that comes up, I’m sure is people have difficulty letting go of the house. How do you deal with that?

Scott: That’s true. There’s a psychology in selling a home that you want to not claim the house for yourself and a good way that people, everybody will recognize as claiming a house is if you walk down a hallway in many homes, you’ll see a parade of pictures that is the family on their vacations, and here they are skiing and here they are water skiing and also the same thing happens at the refrigerator where there’s a whole all the photos of the family are on the refrigerator. These are the sort of things that claim the territory is, this is where I live. This is my home. I enjoy living here and we take all of that down. So, you’re not claiming your home and your home is for sale. We want all of that stuff to just disappear and for a new person to be able to take over that home as their home. You want that to happen psychologically.

Jonathan: Yeah. I know when I bought this house I live in now, the owners had a hard time letting go. And I felt like I was like clawing the house back from them and was a little bit uncomfortable.

Scott: Yeah. And it’s we call that territory marking. It’s not a very good idea when you’re selling your home.

Jonathan: Yeah. And lastly, you have something called the rule of ones, threes, and fives. What is that?

Scott: Well, I’m not sure it’s the final thing, but it’s an important thing. Many people collect things. You may collect frogs. You may collect unicorns. You may collect many different things, many different levels. You could collect Van Gogh paintings if you had the [inaudible] to do that.

Jonathan: I’d do that for sure.

Scott: Yeah, absolutely. I enjoy that your Van Gogh’s. So, you should only show one of them. It’s the strongest to show just one thing and this is going to be like on your mantelpiece in your living room above the fireplace. Having just one thing there is the strongest. Three things are like okay, and five if you just have to have a display especially if you’re a collector you should stop at five as the most that you display of anything. And these are uneven numbers, they don’t have to line up quite right. It always works and there’s this descending order of strength and that’s a very useful rule to know when you’re doing decoration, just around your house and certainly, when the place is up for sale. We failed to mention the color, the top color for the front door is black. Doesn’t work on every house, but a very strong, dark color is your best color for the front door of your house. Trying to think what else would fit into the greatest hits of home preparation. But we’ve hit on some very important ones that make for some pretty big money right here.

Jonathan: Yeah, it sounds great. How can people get a hold of you?

Scott: Well, email is a good way. I’m Scott, at Scott@ScottWilliams.com.

Jonathan: And two Ts in Scott?

Scott: Two Ts in Scott.

Jonathan: Okay. Well, I always liked the great information put in a really simple way quick and it can lead to a large return investment for your listeners. So, tell your friends and family about this, anybody who’s selling a house. And we’ll see you next time at Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Scott Williams: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. If you know someone preparing to sell their home, please tell them about the podcast. Visit ScottWilliams.com to contact me. And download the two free E-booklets, “Is my house saleable now?” and “How not to buy a money pit.” Thank you for listening.