by Debra Gould on June 16, 2009
Summary
In a slow real estate market it’s especially important to romance buyers through every room in a home, even the laundry area. The Staging Diva®, Debra Gould, shares her expert home staging tips for a basement laundry room that might otherwise scare off home buyers.
Stage the Laundry Room to Avoid Scaring Home Buyers
When it comes to rooms that are neglected in home staging, the laundry room often makes the list, especially if it’s part of an unfinished basement.
But that’s a mistake according to home staging expert, Debra Gould, also known as the Staging Diva®. Since it’s important to romance buyers when trying to sell a home, it’s important to get rid of any scary areas and that includes basement laundry areas.
If the laundry area is in the dark corner of an unfinished basement, a buyer might think, “I have to do two loads a day, and I’m supposed to do it in this creepy space? Forget it!” However, if the laundry room is bright, clean and even minimally decorated, the same buyer won’t be using this as a reason not to buy the house.
And in today’s slow real estate market, sellers can’t afford to give a prospective buyer any reason to hesitate.
“You don’t have to go crazy with the design of the laundry room,” says Gould. “Keep it minimalist. It should be brightly lit, clean and functional.”
In this photo example from Debra Gould’s portfolio of staging projects for her Six Elements clients, she transformed a dark unfinished basement that had a washer and dryer hiding behind a mound of junk. Quick fixes included: removing the clutter, painting and adding a few decorative touches. Even though it’s essentially still an unfinished basement, the overall impression is one of usable space that won’t scare off buyers.
Debra Gould offers these home staging tips for the laundry room:
- Discard or store off-site anything that does not have to part of the laundry area. This should not be a dumping ground for unused items
- Easily brighten up the laundry area with a coat of paint and additional lighting. Even an unfinished basement looks better when the concrete floor is painted and there are no dark scary corners.
- Put detergent and other laundering supplies in cupboards or attractive canisters or baskets.
- If there’s a window with a drab view, hide it with a curtain or a nice blind that is light enough to allow some light to pass through it.
With just a small amount of effort, you can transform even the dullest laundry room into a beautiful space and that can go a long way towards helping a prospective buyer imagining their life in the home you’re staging.
If you found this advice useful, you should read Debra Gould’s Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans. Written for home stagers, it’s full of this same type of home staging advice and covers room in a home.
About the author
The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses.
by Debra Gould on June 4, 2009
Summary
A recent survey of Staging Diva Graduates reveals that nearly 20% of those who have taken Staging Diva® training have done so after completing other home staging training programs that didn’t meet their needs.
Survey Reveals 20% of Staging Diva Graduates Come from Other Home Staging Training Programs
(United States) June 4, 2009 – Most students completing a training program for a new career in home staging expect that they’ll be able to earn a living from their skills. However, a recent survey reveals that this is often not the case.
Anyone planning to enroll in a home staging training program should know that almost 20% of those who graduate from the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program took other programs first and turned to Staging Diva after realizing they never really learned how to start their own staging business or how to make money at it.
This comes as no surprise to The Staging Diva® herself, Debra Gould, who says, “I receive countless emails and phone calls from stagers who have taken other training programs but have no idea how to get home staging clients or how to properly charge for their services.” Gould adds, “This is because other training programs focus on the design aspect of becoming a home stager rather than the business side. Staging Diva training focuses on how to run a successful home staging business so that instead of having a home staging hobby, students actually learn how to make money from their talents.”
With everyone watching their expenses in this economy, it’s important to do plenty of research when choosing a training program to avoid the disappointment of not learning the required skills despite making a significant investment of time and money. Unfortunately, it’s often not until a home stager is out there trying to get business that they realize they should have spent more time learning about marketing, pricing and how to properly run a business.
While studying survey results from recent Staging Diva® Graduates, Gould learned that 98% of those surveyed would still choose Staging Diva training if they had to make that choice again. Furthermore, 98.8% of Staging Diva Graduates would recommend Staging Diva® Training to other aspiring home stagers.
“I know the Staging Diva® Program is the most comprehensive and valuable home staging training program on the market, but it’s wonderful to see such positive feedback from our students,” comments Gould who has trained more than 1500 home stagers on 5 continents.
For more information about the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program, visit http://www.experthomestagingtraining.com
About Staging Diva
The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained over 1500 home stagers to start and grow their own businesses.
Debra has gained international recognition through features in major media in the US and Canada including: This Old House, HGTV, CNN Money, CBC National News, CBS Radio, Global TV, City TV, The Wall Street Journal, Women’s Day, Reader’s Digest and more.
Contact
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva
Six Elements Inc.
416-691-6615
Email
http://www.stagingdiva.com
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by Debra Gould on May 27, 2009
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva’s home staging secrets are featured on AOL Real Estate.
Excerpt from AOL Real Estate:
Here are before-and-after photos of rooms in houses stager Debra Gould (pictured) has staged in the Toronto area, along with information about fees paid and sales prices.
See all the Staging Diva’s home staging photos on AOL Real Estate.
by Debra Gould on May 26, 2009
Summary
While many people agree the wife is the principal decision maker when a couple buys a house, it’s important to stage a home to appeal to husbands too. Home staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®, shares tips for decorating the garage to help a home sell in today’s real estate market.
Garage helps build wow factor for male home buyers
Home sellers often assume that as long as their house is clean it’s ready to sell. But it takes much more than that to stand out, especially in a slow real estate market. While attractive kitchens and bathrooms certainly help a house sell (because they’re the most expensive rooms to renovate), the garage is important too, especially if you’re trying to appeal to male home buyers.
While most people would agree the wife is the principal decision maker in a home purchase, it’s important to wow husbands too. Many home sellers mistakenly assume they can store all their extra junk in the garage, close the garage door and then hope no one notices or cares when they put their house on the market.
“Garages are an important selling feature in a home,” says expert home stager, Debra Gould, “unfortunately most people fail to organize them properly to showcase the space and how it can be used.” Gould, who created the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program after running her own successful home staging business adds, “Your goal when decorating a house to sell— whether you do it yourself or hire a professional home stager to take over the job— is to help prospective buyers imagine their life in a home. If your garage is full of clutter and looks too small, buyers will be turned off. Men especially like to see how much stuff they can store in a garage and whether there’s a work space for them too. Most won’t be able to see past your junk, so don’t leave it there when trying to sell your home.”
The Staging Diva® says, “One of the reasons people move is to have more space for their stuff, so don’t show them you’re having the same problem by putting everything in the garage, or they won’t be motivated to buy your property.” She offers the following home staging tips for the garage:
- Be ruthless about removing all clutter. Get rid of anything that doesn’t have to be there. Home sellers can donate unwanted items to charity and put non-essential seasonal items into off-site storage.
- Create a “workshop area” by organizing tools on pegboards instead of leaving them lying around. Small expensive tools should be removed as these might disappear during an open house when visitors may not be so closely supervised.
- Free standing shelves can be added to help organize items and get them off the floor. This is not a lost investment as shelving that is not attached to walls, or cabinets that are not built in, can be taken along to the home seller’s next house when they move.
- Home sellers can keep shovels, the lawnmower, gardening tools and bicycles in the garage but make sure they’re organized.
- Dispose of old paint cans so that buyers won’t worry this will be their problem if they buy the house.
If the floor and walls look bad, consider a fresh coat of paint. But don’t paint a concrete floor gray, warm it up with a neutral, for example a soft mushroom color works well. A complementary neutral can be used on the walls.
For more home staging tips, check out Debra Gould’s Staging Diva® Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans. Written for home stagers, it explains how to stage every space in a home and includes tons of photographs and floor plans from The Staging Diva’s own home staging projects to illustrate all the design concepts.
by Debra Gould on May 25, 2009
Center of The City Magazine, May 2006
“Debra Gould is The Staging Diva”
Story by Karen Bridson-Boyczuk
Photography by Jill Kitchener
Excerpt from Centre of the City Magazine:
They are known as “fluffers.”
They are the creative minds realtors depend on in their effort to make top dollar on the sale of a home. With a bit of paint, a few selected touches, an imaginative eye and a lot of elbow grease, the work of these “home stagers,” as they are more commonly known, can quite dramatically increase the selling price of a home. . . .
Staging Diva Debra Gould, says homeowners without any plans for selling can make drastic improvements to the look of their homes simply by following a few ‘home fluffing’ techniques.
“So often my clients say, ‘wow, and to think, (my house) could have looked like this for the last five years,” says Gould, president of Six Elements Inc. (www.stagingdiva.com).
Gould says there are some very basic steps people can take to ‘fluff’ their homes for themselves.
“The biggest problem I see in people’s homes is inadequate lighting,” she says. “Many people live in very dark, dingy homes and they don’t even know it.” . . .
Beyond small clutter items, many homes have too much furniture for the size of the rooms, she says. . . .
“So it’s important to take a look at how else the furniture can be arranged in a room,” she says. “Often people will say, ‘oh, it never occurred to me to put that there.’ . . .
Mismatched bedding and towels are another pet peeve of Gould’s. . . . “I’m always buying sheets and duvets and towels to go into the homes I stage,” she says. “It gives you a nice focal point and can make such a huge difference to the way a room looks.” . . .
“If you’ve got a basement filled with things you are planning to fix one day, just get rid of them. People feel liberated when they knock those things off of their to-do lists. It’s very freeing.” . . .
Gould has staged hundreds of homes, ranging in price from $190,000 to $1.5 million. . . .
by Debra Gould on May 5, 2009
BUILDER Magazine
“Spiff Up Your Standing Inventory: Builders share their strategies for moving houses that need to be sold”
by Pat Curry
Excerpt from BUILDER Magazine:
SET THE STAGE
Many builders have found that staging inventory homes helps buyers visualize living there. Plus, when buyers walk into a furnished room, they’re looking at how the house lives instead of nitpicking where the light fixtures are located. Debra Gould, a home staging trainer known as The Staging Diva, says that builders can achieve the goals of staging without spending a fortune, just by paying attention to some basic principles.
“You could probably do the average three-bedroom home for about $5,000,” she says. “We’re not talking about huge sums of money, if it makes the difference between people walking in and falling in love with it and picking it apart. … It’s all about perception and context. You can buy a cotton T-shirt at WalMart for $5 or a fancy one for $150. They’re similar, but one of them is in a fancy boutique.”
When you’re staging, take a minimalist approach to the amount of furniture you put in the house. You need a focal point in each room, but the idea is to show off the house, not sell knickknacks and linens.
“You don’t need to cram it with as much stuff as someone who is living there,” she says. “You don’t want it to feel vacant, but you don’t need as much seating as you would normally have in a home. … Set up little scenarios where people can see themselves. If you have an empty corner, make it a little reading corner. If there’s an eat-in kitchen, put a table there, but you don’t need to set the table.”
Where you do want to go a bit over the top is the master suite.
“Bedrooms are important,” Gould says. “Dress the bed really well. I hate going to houses that are half a million dollars and the bed has nothing on it. If you go to a bedding store, see how the beds are dressed. That’s what you want.”
The master bath can be warmed up with a stack of nice, fluffy towels. Gould says her idea of staging a bathroom is “what a bathroom in a Four Seasons hotel looks like before you unpack all your junk.” That means it’s sparkling clean with decorative soaps, a shower curtain if it’s not an enclosed stall, art on the walls, and, yes, toilet paper.
In a family neighborhood, make sure one of the bedrooms is staged as a child’s room. “It doesn’t take much to create that ambiance—one twin bed, one table, a lamp, some stuffed animals, and kid bedding,” she says. If you’re selling to young families, show a nursery. “It gets Mom all excited,” Gould says.
> Read the full story in Builder Magazine
by Debra Gould on April 28, 2009
Summary
The Staging Diva®, Debra Gould, who has bought and sold 8 of her own properties in both hot and cold real estate markets, debunks the myth that people have stopped buying houses.
Smart people buying real estate despite slow market warnings
Today’s real estate market is actually a very good one for first-time and trade-up home buyers because interest rates and prices are low.
“Over the long term, real estate is always a sound investment, especially if you’re living in it,” says Debra Gould who has bought 8 homes in both hot and cold real estate markets. “The only people losing money in real estate (and in the stock market, for that matter) are those who bought at the height of the market and have to sell at a loss. Real estate moves in cycles, and prices will eventually rebound.”
“If you’re considering trading up to a more expensive home, now is the time to do it,” says Debra Gould who is not a real estate agent but has made money over the years flipping her own properties.
“If the market goes up 10% and you have a $300,000 home, your home’s value will only go up by $30,000. On the other hand, if you have a $500,000 home, your home’s value will increase $50,000 over the same period.”
“But you should only trade up to the $500,000 home if you can afford the $200,000 price difference,” she adds.
Like the opportunity to trade up in a slower market, or the chance to get in now if you’ve been priced out as a first time buyer for the past several years, there are many opportunities in real estate today.
That’s why people who feel comfortable with their income source and aren’t drowning in debt will continue to buy and sell homes. And this means a continued growth in demand for home staging services.
According to the National Association of Realtors® there were 4.9 million homes sold in the U.S. in 2008, and the projection for 2009 sees that number growing by 6.6% to 5.2 million.
Furthermore, all the doom-and-gloom news about declining property values fails to mention how much more homes are still worth today than they were 10 or 15 years ago in most markets.
Debra Gould, founder of the Staging Diva® Home Staging Business Training Program says, “With over 5.2 million houses projected to sell in the U.S. in 2009 alone, that’s a huge potential demand for home stagers. As you can see from this projected growth of 6.6%, the real estate market hasn’t come to a dead stop at all!”
For more information and a more balanced look at the current economy and real estate market, download your free copy of Debra Gould’s special report: “Can I grow a home staging business in a depressed economy?”
by Debra Gould on April 26, 2009
Radio Colorado Network – September 18, 2007
Interview about home staging with Joe White
Joe White interviewed home staging expert Debra Gould about why home staging is important in a slower real estate market and how homeowners can find a home stager to help decorate their homes to sell more quickly and at a higher price.
Debra also explained why some real estate agents are reluctant to recommend home staging even when it would be in their client’s best interest.
by Debra Gould on April 23, 2009
Lincoln Live – KFOR 1240 AM
Dale Johnson interviews Staging Diva Debra Gould
Morning Show Host Dale Johnson grilled home staging expert Debra Gould about:
- what home staging is
- why home staging works (logic versus emotion when house hunting)
- less is more in home staging
- curb appeal – how to get it and why it’s critical when selling a home
- whether it is important to stage all rooms in a home
- low cost kitchen makeover ideas
- tips on what homeowners can do on their own to decorate their homes to sell
It was a great interview perhaps in part because this Lincoln Nebraska radio host was stuck with his own house that he couldn’t sell. Dale Johnson was really hungry for any help he could get with his own home, and had obviously done his homework on the subject of home staging before interviewing The Staging Diva.
Listen to recording of show or download here
by Debra Gould on April 23, 2009
Summary
With mounting job losses in the current economy, many unemployed or underemployed individuals are weighing what type of business they might start on their own. Debra Gould, also know as The Staging Diva®, compares home staging with other businesses an aspiring entrepreneur might consider.
Weighing home staging against other career options
As job loss figures mount in the United States, Canada and around the world, more people are rediscovering a long held desire to be an entrepreneur. For creative individuals especially, decorating is a common theme. A related business is home staging which offers many benefits.
Some of the benefits of a home staging career include the:
- flexibility it offers to pick your own hours
- very low entry costs and next to no overhead
- high income potential in both slow and hot real estate markets
Here’s how a home staging business stacks up against other possible new business opportunities:
Decorator
In the past decorators and interior designers have made the bulk of their profits from mark ups on furniture and fabrics. However, the Internet has made it easier for customers to source what they need without the help of a designer to get them access to unique goods.
At the same time, in this economy decorating is one of the first things someone would cut back on to save money. It’s a non-essential service with no inherent deadlines. In other words, you might want to redecorate your living room, but there is rarely a compelling deadline to do it now.
On the other hand, home staging is still “decorating” but because it’s with a goal of helping a house sell on the real estate market, there is a deadline and customers are highly motivated to take action now rather than later.
Retail operation
Many entrepreneurs in the past have dreamed of opening a retail store to sell products they’re especially interested in. However, one need only look at all the “for rent” signs in most retail areas to know that this is not the best time to set yourself up for the high overhead costs of a store. Besides, considerable start up capital is required to decorate the store front, hire staff and build the inventory that would be required.
Further the need to be open during business hours and weekends offers little flexibility. Home stagers are able to book clients around their schedule and without a store front there are no public hours of operation to adhere to.
Multi-level marketing business(MLM)
There are a myriad of MLM schemes out there, but you’re usually required to buy inventory and spend a lot of time recruiting other distributors in order to make any money. Most people give up on these businesses when they realize how hard it is to sell their stock piled inventory at the same time as constantly recruiting new members into the business.
In home staging you are marketing your business to find your own clients, but you don’t have to convince others to become home stagers too!
Real estate agent
Over the past 8 years or so, the real estate industry has been completely saturated with new agents hoping to make quick and easy money as the real estate market continued to heat up. There is one agent for every 4 properties sold in the US and Canada, too many to make a good living for all but the top agents. With the current slow down in the real estate market it will be even harder to make a living if you’re a new agent.
Besides, real estate agents are basically on call 24/7 and work every weekend, making it a difficult career for anyone with children. Compared to home staging, which is still a real estate-related career, there is much higher overhead as an agent with the significant downside of only getting paid when a house sells.
If you’re faced with underemployment or unemployment and you’re dreaming of starting a home staging business, take advantage of Debra Gould’s FREE special report “Ask Staging Diva: Can I grow a home staging business in a depressed economy?” You’ll learn how the current recession can actually help you follow your dreams.
About the Author, Debra Gould
Home staging expert Debra Gould has been an entrepreneur since 1989 which means she knows first hand how to find the opportunities that exist in a recession since her marketing consulting business flourished throughout the 1990s. Today she is president of Six Elements Inc. and the creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program which has helped over 1000 Graduates start their own home staging businesses on 5 continents.
