Posts Tagged ‘Real Estate Calgary’

Recognizing the right home stagers in Calgary

If you thought that home staging is just another fad, think again. The Home Gain Survey reported the results of their study of more than 2,000 realtors and found that the staged homes often sell for almost 17 percent more than a home that was not professionally prepared for sale. The survey also found out that a staged home sold twice as fast as the home that has not been treated by professional stagers.

Calgary market is picking up and slowly recovering from the recession blues. As banks are announcing interest rate raise, many home owners are thinking of taking advantage of the climate and trying their luck. So, how to get ahead and make your home stand out from the crowd?  How to make most money from your biggest investment? Many home owners found out from experience that home staging is the first step, right after you find a good, professional and experienced realtor.

There is a number of home stagers in Calgary and all of them claim to be professional, accredited and experienced. Finding the one that suits your needs requires a bit of common sense.

What do home stagers do?

Home stagers will prepare your home for the market. Instead of your home, it will become a market product and they will prepare it for as wide number of potential client as possible. They will depersonalize your home to enable other people to imagine themselves in your home

How should a staged home look like?

Home staged for sale should look clean, neutral, the décor should be appropriate to the architecture of the home. The furniture and appliances should respond to the current client expectations. So, if you happily lived in your home for 15 years with your art deco collection and with your fixture and fittings that worked just fine all that time, you can be sure that the first thing your home stager will tell you: let’s bring your home to the 21st century. After all, did you like all that stuff you found in your home when you moved in?

Where can one look for a home stager?

Your best advisor is your realtor. If you are lucky, your real estate agency offers free home staging. It is in their interest to sell the home as fast as possible and for as much money as they can get. If they have their own team of home stagers, and your realtor has a good sale history, do not hesitate, use them. If you have to look elsewhere, web is a good place, as well as the Yellow Pages.

How to know if a home stager is really good?

Home staging is still in its infancy as a business and there is no official accreditation. Their experience and testimonials from their former clients is your best guidance. Look at their portfolio  and ask for references. Call their former clients and ask if they would hire them again.

Should you pay for a home stagers’ visit and estimate?

Professional home stagers make a living from offering their advice to clients. Once they visit your home and offer you advice on what to do next, they sold you their knowledge and expertise. Their advice is valuable, so do not hesitate to pay for it.

Even if you found a great Calgary home stager, do your part as well: do not forget about the age-old advice and make your home smell like a home – bake some cookies before the next Open House.

Professional Home Staging Calgary for your most important Investment

Home stagers used to be reserved for mansions and million dollar homes. Not any more. They are becoming an accepted cost to making your home the best it can be in the highly competitive market of home sales. Professionally staged homes reportedly sell for 30 percents more and in half the time of non-staged homes.

Most important job of a home stager is to turn your home from a collection of memories and life well lived, to a market product. This process, which we realistically know is necessary, is very difficult for homeowners to accept. Our homes are full of signs of life lived in it: kids’ drawings, posters from favorite movies, dog’s favorite sofa, red walls in daughter’s room. All those things can go with us; what stays behind is a house that will soon become someone else’s.

Home stagers need to make your home attractive to as large number of customers as possible. That means neutralizing it and making it possible for total strangers to imagine themselves in it. No, not your home any more. The quicker you accept that, the less painful the transition will be and the quicker your home will sell.

House stagers also know the latest trends, what majority of new home buyers come to expect. You might have happily lived with your 50’s kitchen, but buyers expect stainless steel.  You spent fortune collecting pieces for your collection of art deco furniture. But, it is not everyone’s cup of tea, so it has to go.

People who are buying home are also buying a certain style of living. Home stagers have to make your home the best it can be.  We are not always aware of certain features of our homes, and did not have to make them a focus for the outsiders. Professional home stagers have an objective eye for the best your home has to offer. They know the architecture periods, furniture styles, and the staging often means adding new furniture, changing fixtures, painting walls so that the architecture of our home stands out surrounded with things that match the period or style.

One of the most painful things about selling a home is the fact that we have to suspend out lives for the duration, and to keep our homes practically unlivable, cleaned to perfection, until it sells. Professional home staging promise to shorten this period by half and the results show that they do keep that promise.

The prices of home staging are not unreasonable and it can be considered an investment. For an evaluation visit, the cost range between $100 and $200. You can opt to take their advice and do the job yourself, or you can continue using their service. That would mean additional costs, which depend on the changes you accept, the costs of other service providers like plumbers and electricians, and the furniture and appliances you accept to purchase.

For more details on a professional home staging, check the Unique Home Staging and their extensive gallery of staged homes at Calgary Home Staging site

Reasons Professional Home Organizers in Calgary are Vital

You will know that you need a professional organizer if you, for the third time this week, cannot find your briefcase, or your keys, or your baby’s favorite doll. Calgary is like any other town: we rush between work, kids’ school, shopping, dry-cleaning, mother-in-law visits, hairdresser’s appointment etc. The list is long and organizing your closet and your whole home if you are to be honest, is very low on your list of priorities. But, do not despair. There is help at hand. Professional organizers are now part of the mainstream help to busy families, and even businesses. They help with downsizing, relocating, home staging and simplifying our lives in general.

Why do you need a professional organizer?

Stress is a killer. Living with clutter and spending hours of your time looking for things, swamped by stuff, unable to function properly, does not make sense. We tend to surround ourselves with things, which often lose their appeal shortly after being purchased. Organizing your home is much more than sorting things and putting them in a right box: it might be just the beginning of organizing your life. We need an objective eye to help us sort between what we really need and what is just a clutter.

What do home organizers do?

Professional, well-trained and experienced organizers will review your home or an office and they will ask you to focus on what is bothering you the most. Whether it is your home office with thousands of papers littering the floor, or a garage, with a mountain of boxes which lost their origin ages ago, or your bedroom closet, which cannot get closed any more with clothes spilling out. With an objective eye, they will help you sort out things you really need to keep and those that should be given to someone who will make better use of them. Getting rid of junk is an inevitable and the most important first stage of this process. Of course, what is junk to one person is a treasure to another. You will have to do most of the work: when sorting out memorabilia, for example, sound advice of professionals is to keep one or two object which represent a certain period in your life, or a special event, and give away the rest.  Clothes are even easier: the rule of thumb is: if you have not worn something in a year, the chance is you will never wear it again. Don’t even think of keeping it until it becomes fashionable again.

What happens afterwards?

Professional organizers will help you de-clutter and sort your things in a meaningful way. It will often involve purchasing containers, boxes, baskets, closet dividers and similar. But, you have to make the commitment to the newly obtained order: everything should have its space and once the things cannot fit any more, it is time to purge. Once you get used to it, you will have fun. After all, you are one of thousands of people in Calgary enjoying the fruits of labor of one of the qualified professional organizers. What happens to the clutter? They go to one of many deserving charities. The most difficult task for you will be to resist all those wonderful garage sales that crop up every spring in various Calgary neighborhoods.