SPRING REAL ESTATE SHOWCASE
Home staging can lead to quick sale of house

NEW JERSEY SUNDAY HERALD Sunday, April 22, 2007
PUBLISHED IN SPRING REAL ESTATE GUIDE

Prospective home buyers make their buying decisions within 10 seconds of walking into a house. Realtors agree that buyers begin to form opinions about a house from the moment they pull up in the driveway. It is therefore imperative that home sellers strive to create the best first impression, starting with the exterior of the house and continuing throughout the interior.

This is where a Certified Professional home stager comes into the picture.

The home stager is trained to view a home through the eyes of a prospective buyer and is able to make recommendations on how to depersonalize the property so that it will appeal to the widest possible range of buyers.

According to Nancy Maurer, President of Whitehall Interiors & Home Staging, ?A home seller?s house is no longer their home. When sellers make the decision to sell their homes, they are not selling their personal tastes or memorabilia; rather, they are selling the unique features that make up their homes.? The home stager is equipped to highlight those unique features and create an atmosphere that will leave a lasting, positive impression on buyers.

A home stager will help home sellers with the detailed and time-consuming process of putting their homes on the market. A stager will provide a thorough evaluation of the home?s exterior and interior, room-by-room.

Sellers will be provided with a comprehensive, written Action Plan and accompanying Check List of items that they can either complete themselves or have the home stager do for them. These items may include activities that range from painting, repairs, de-cluttering, re-accessorizing spaces, furniture arranging, and landscaping, among others.

If home sellers want maximum value and a fast sale, it is critical that their homes are professionally presented to buyers. Home staging will do just this. Having a home stand out from the competition, conveying that ?wow? factor to the prospective buyer, is the ultimate goal of the home stager.

Well-known in other parts of the country as ?the secret weapon of real estate,? home staging is still a relatively new phenomenon to homeowners in the New Jersey area. It is increasing in popularity, however, as the inventory of homes grows larger and the sluggish housing market grows increasingly competitive. Home owners must find ways to make their homes stand out from the crowd if they are to be considered by prospective buyers.

Countless success stories exist about how home staging helps sellers sell their homes quickly and for top dollar. Take, for example, the Cedar Grove couple who had their home staged prior to listing it. They sold their house in three days for $12,500 above the asking price. As another example, a Southern New Jersey couple had their home staged and sold it at its first open house for the asking price.

According to a 2006 StagedHomes.com survey, homes listed for sale without staging spent an average 4.5 months on the market. Homes staged before listing spent less than 1.5 months on the market. The average time for a staged home to reach a sales pending? status was about a week. Staging also boosts the estimated sales price by at least 3 percent, according to Whitehall Interiors & Home Staging LLC, a company based in Sparta that provides home staging services to home sellers and realtors and interior design services to home and business owners.

Maurer brings her experience as a trained interior designer to her home staging business.

In addition to being a bachelor of fine arts degree candidate at The New York School of Interior Design, she is a certified International Staging Professional. For more information contact Nancy Maurer at (973) 978-5195.

? 2007 New Jersey Sunday Herald