By Laura Hipshire
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Three showings, 30 days. That’s all it took for Clark and Barb Reid to sell their 3,000-square-foot condominium in Birmingham, before they moved to Fox Run in Novi.

Amazing, especially considering many of the couple’s neighbors on either side had been trying to sell their homes for up to two years.

How did the magic happen? Reid says he credits Sharon Baksa, move-in program manager at Fox Run, and her team of experts.

‘Staging’ explained
Baksa suggested the Reid’s “stage” their home, a term Reid had never heard before despite the fact that he and his wife had moved a total of seven times.

“In essence, ‘staging’ means making your house look as pretty as it is capable of looking,” Reid explains.

With so many houses for sale these days, it is indeed a buyer’s market, so any method that will help a house sell faster is a plus.

“You have to think of your home as a product,” says Barb Schwarz, CEO and founder of  StagedHomes.com, in a recent Fortune magazine article. Schwarz has personally staged more than 5,000 homes over the past 33 years.

Experts: staged homes sell in record time
According to Schwarz, staged homes sell in an average of seven days—compared to 45 days for unstaged homes.

“First impressions can launch or kill a house sale,” Reid says. Some of the suggestions Baksa made for the outside of their home included landscaping, planting brightly colored flowers, cleaning sidewalks, and getting rid of weeds.

De-cluttering the inside was essential. “Show nothing on the floor but the furniture,” Reid says. “Remove a large portion of wall decorations, particularly family photographs, but also ‘extreme’ art works. Remove or temporarily hide an over-abundance of souvenirs, collector’s items, knickknacks. Taking up runners or throw rugs gives the room an appearance of more spaciousness.” Reid says these were all ideas he used to stage his home.