FAQ and New Pictures

What's new for 2015? What is changing in our industry? Any predictions for the future of home staging and redesign? I get questions about the future of our industry all the time. We speak regularly to real estate investors, agents and home buyers in our area. We also participate in a monthly conference call with the Real Estate Staging Association chapter presidents from around the country.   What is happening locally and nationally? Locally, those of us who have websites and a social media presence are busier than ever. This has been my best January in 10 years. More home sellers are open and enthusiastic about hiring a stager.   Are agents attitudes about the value of staging improving? Agent's attitudes locally about staging haven't been changing as fast as we would like. The younger ones value our services more. We have a number of agents who stage nearly every listing. Agents tell me that if they recommend home staging and the homeowners decline, if the property sits on the market too long, those homeowners don't blame the agent. That's a pretty good reason but our stats continue to improve. 30 days vs 90 days on the market. 95% of our listings sell within 2 weeks.    What are the trends in home staging? Have you noticed how Baskin Robbins Ice Cream has partnered with Dunkin Donuts? They share a building to minimize costs. One of the trends we see is that home stagers are partnering with others service providers to be a "one stop shop" for the home owners. Things like organizing and senior move management top the list. One of our class graduates partners with a photographer/ videographer; another with a cleaning company. Everyone gets more business.   How are your class grads doing now? Recently, one of our local stagers, Kelly Wulburn, appeared on a pilot for a new HGTV series. The house sold in 6 days, by the way.  Another grad from California is being considered for an HGTV reality show. Jaima  Emmert from Jaima Brown Home is an international fabric designer. Randa Clark is a designer and stager in Chicago who specializes in chemical sensitivities. Gale Marcell from the Palm Beach area gets great opportunities to update multi-million dollar homes built in the glory days of the area.    Interestingly enough, one of our grads from 5 years ago is THE home stager for a chain of 13 real estate offices in Pennsylvania. She got placed on the vendor list of one office and gradually the others added her. She averages $2000 a job and is a busy gal. If you are a grad, please let me know how you are doing. I would LOVE to hear from you.   What are you working on right now? Currently, we are staging a 6,000 sq. ft. home on the Intra-coastal waterway... 8 bathrooms, for crying out loud. It was pretty nice before we began.  It has taken about 26 man hours to complete. We are still waiting for the professional photos but some of my favorite pictures from my camera are included here. A mountain of furniture and accessories came out and went to storage. We loved every minute working on this fun project, not to mention the added benefit of getting to know the interesting couple who own this amazing property.   Any continuing ed webinars coming up? Yes, next week we will do an encore of our Curb Appeal presentation. It's a short webinar and you can participate. If you wish to join us, sign up by emailing me. EMAIL Very limited space.Tuesday 2-10-15 at 3:00PM EST  I am so grateful for those of you who take the time to read the blog. You are truly good friends. Have a beautiful day.           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~