Neil's Blog

Shout it Out!!!!

Neil Bindelglass (Let Me Organize You) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:55:39 -0600

I had a wonderful experience the other day that had very little to do with home staging, and EVERYTHING to do with doing business successfully.

I have a home staging / organizing client. I am helping a family to prepare their home for sale as well as getting them organized in the process. A large part of the job is helping this couple with their home offices. They both work from home, and both own their own companies.

These clients are rare for me, in that I could become friends with them. I am always very careful in drawing boundaries with my clients, and I seldom share personal information with them. In this case however, I have ignored some of my own rules, and much to my benefit. In working so intimately with these clients, I have shared some information about myself, my past professional experiences and my philosophy of doing business. I was an investment banker in a previous professional life, as well as an industry analyst for a holding company that owned advertising and marketing agencies. I also hold a Master's degree in Library and Information Service.

My client owns a company that sells a specific kind of technology to libraries. Obviously, there is synergy there, and as we worked in his office, we started discussing business. The upshot is that yesterday, he not only called me out of the blue to ask my advice on some marketing ideas that he had, but also to ask me if I would do some (well) paid consulting for him and his partners! Not only was I flattered, but I happy to dip my toe back into one of my prior careers.

The point of my telling you this story is to point out how important it is for our clients to know where we come from. This can open doors for us, it can validate what we do, and it can ultimately result in more and better business.

A Very Small Can of Paint

Neil Bindelglass (Let Me Organize You) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:22:35 -0500

OK, as a home stager, not to mention a real estate buyer, one of my biggest pet peeves is paint that needs to be touched up.

I am in the process of looking for a new home in Saratoga Springs. I recently viewed an absolutely beautiful home that had not been staged. The owner had broiled salmon the night before my 8AM viewing of the house. The house was a mess. All of the lights were on, but there were dirty dishes in the sink, the house reeked of fish, the pale Berber carpets were filthy, and the house was in general chaos. And, incidentally, this was a $450K house in a $550K neighborhood. Small wonder!

Anyway, there were obviously children in the house. All of the doorways were black and grimy. All of the trim needed to be touched up, and many of the walls were skuffed. OK, so touching up trim is not exactly my idea of a fun way to spend the afternoon, but if you are working on selling your biggest investment, bite the bullet and DO IT (or hire me to do it for you)!

The Realtor told the owners of the house my comment about the filthy doorways and the need for touch-up paint. They actually did it. I went back to see the house for a second time (even with the total lack of staging, this house was a serious contender), and the doorways were cleaned (presumably with a magic sponge) and the paint touched up. What a difference!!! I haven't made an offer on the house yet, but to my professional eye, this small action made a world of difference!

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE VALUE OF A VERY SMALL CAN OF PAINT!!!!

Old, stale, dry, unappealing listings

Neil Bindelglass (Let Me Organize You) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:58:39 -0500

One of the things that I have done of late for my clients is to help them out of the "my house has been on the market for ever and nobody has been brought through in two months" syndrome is to do what I call Stale Listing Staging. Here's how it works:

A client calls in either frustration or desperation because their house is on the market, the listing is stale, and no-one is interested. OK, so they have finally gotten around to hiring a professional stager. The strategy that I use is for the client to temporarily take their house off the market (and make sure that it is removed from the Multiple Listing Service and that any signage is taken down during the staging). I then work my usual magic. De-cluttering, re-arranging, getting rid of the puce carpeting in the rumpus room, giving the house some more curb appeal - you get the idea.

Once the house has been staged, it is re-listed with their Realtor. It will now come up on the MLS as a new listing. It can even be advertised as a "freshly staged home." The Realtor schedules an open house (which I usually attend to keep the real estate agent company, and to keep them from being alone in the house) to kick off the new and improved listing. A new set of photographs has been taken for the listing and the new photographs are used on the MLS and in any marketing collateral.

Often, I ask the real estate agent (who I ALWAYS call to tell what the homeowner and I are up to) to invite some of the perspective buyers who have already seen the house to come back and take another look. Chances are that they won't even recognize the house! And these houses sell within a month or so if not faster.

So this is a call to arms for Real Estate Agents - convince, beg if necessary, your clients with stale listings to enlist some serious professional help, in the form of a Professional Home Stager. They'll thank you for it, and they'll sell their home!

Sharp Objects and Staging for Living

Neil Bindelglass (Let Me Organize You) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:53:55 -0600

I cut myself in the kitchen last night with a paring knife. Not a big deal (although my hand still throbs), but it made me think about a client experience that I had several years ago. One that I don't think will ever leave me.

Before I became a professional stager, I was a professional organizer. These two professions share a great synergy, and what I used to call professional organization is now known in the industry as "Staging for Living." Regardless of what we choose to call it, it is all the same thing, and when we work with clients, we develop a relationship that often becomes far more involved than we as professionals would like.

As a professional organizer, I was called in to meet a client who needed me to get her grandchildren back. Her son was separated and had moved back in with her. He had two daughters by his estranged wife. The wife didn't want the children in their grandmother's house because the house was a mess and borderline dangerous for small children. Not borderline actually, way beyond the pale. Enter me. My purpose was to get things cleaned up so that when Child Protective Services did their inspection, they would find no reason to bar the children from visiting their grandmother.

This particular client was a month long project. I was with her almost every day. The clean-up was a monumental job, and we did it. But spending that kind of time with a client, one is bound to get to know the client VERY well, and even become privy to details of a client's life that one doesn't really want to be privy to. Strangely enough, being a professional organizer would be a dream come true for someone with voyeuristic tendencies. However, the really good, successful professional organizers that I've known (and I hope to be part of this group) aren't voyeurs and make every attempt to learn as little about their client's inner lives as possible.

One particular day, in the kitchen, I found a plastic shoe box. In the box were all kinds of sharp objects. Knives, razors, awls, scissors, utility knives, folding knives and the like. And the box was full to capacity. I made an offhanded joke about sharp objects to my client. We had been working together for a couple of weeks, and we had an easy rapport. She became very quiet, sat down and began to tell me the story of the box and its contents.

Her youngest son had been suicidal a few years prior. The family had lost their eldest son to cancer when he was 22 (this was the first that I had heard of this; I had seen no evidence of another child in the house). The youngest son had become suicidal, and my client had spent a year sleeping on the floor outside his bedroom so that he couldn't get out and do himself damage. After about a year, the son's psychiatrist finally got the kid's medications right, and he was no longer in imminent danger.

Talk about a tailspin for me. The lesson here is that when people's homes are truly a mess, there is usually an underlying reason. Sometimes we find out what it is, sometimes we don't. But we have to remain very sensitive to our client's lives, and especially to their inner lives. They've invited us into their homes to do work on a very intimate level. We have to acknowledge this, and we need to remain sensitive to it.

Educating the willing

Neil Bindelglass (Let Me Organize You) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:41:07 -0600

I just had a fantastic experience staging a home for sale!

Two weeks ago, I was called by a client who was in distress. They needed to sell their home badly due to financial reverses, and were very anxious to have it on the market. They had clutter galore, twenty years of detritis in the house, way too much furniture, and very dark heavy curtains on every window. As well, there are many homes in their neighborhood for sale at the moment, as the market is very slow here.

The day of my initial consultation, their Realtor (a top producer who had been a part of their community for decades) was to meet with them as soon as I was done. They were to sign their contract and put the house on the market IMMEDIATELY. I advised them against this. Although this family had a beautiful home and very nice things in it, it was in no way ready to be on the market. They were adamant that they wanted the house on the market the next day, and since they were the client, I had no choice....

Enter the Realtor. A very successful businesswoman. She had NEVER HEARD OF HOME STAGING. Never. So I began talking with her, explained what home stagers do. We went on a tour of the house. I explained to her what my plan was for making the house market-ready.

We all sat down together to discuss how we would tackle this project. The Realtor understood what I needed to do, and joined my cause, telling the homeowners to wait the two weeks until the home was staged before having the open house. When the homeowners objected to waiting two weeks, the Realtor told them that they could list with someone else if they wanted the house on the market that quickly. That two weeks was very little time, and that my actions as a home stager would make the property sell itself.

I worked with the clients for two weeks, de-cluttering (we filled two 30 cubic yard dumpsters), packing, painting, getting rid of the curtains, and finally staging.

I staged Saturday and Sunday morning. The open house was held Sunday from 11 until 3. After staging, I changed into professional clothes and kept the Realtor company for the duration of the open house. We had six visitors. Two of them made offers yesterday evening. The sellers (my client) accepted one of them this morning, for just $1,000 below their asking price!

The moral of this story is that the Realtor who had never heard of home staging was willing to listen to me, immediately saw the benefit of home staging, and even went out on a limb to improve her own inventory. Kudos to her!

Why you should hire a home stager to decorate model homes...

Neil Bindelglass (Let Me Organize You) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:53:52 -0600

I've worked with several home builders recently, and the experience has been beneficial for several reasons. The first of which is cost. My first builder client called me in because he had met with an interior designer to decorate a 1,200 square foot townhouse. The interior designer quoted him $35,000 for furniture, accessories and window treatments! An investment that the builder would then have to dispose of if the model home didn't sell furnished.

During our first meeting, I called a colleague who works for a high end furniture rental company and told her that I had a 1,200 square foot, three bedroom model home. She immediately came up with $2,000 a month to fully furnish the home in "Pottery Barn Style." Done. That, along with the rental of my accessories, and the initial layout for the builder (which covered my services as a home stager and first month's furniture and accessories rental) came to roughly $5,000. The furniture and accessories would cost $2,000 per additional month that the house was on the market. Once the model home sold, I as stager "de-staged" it, taking back my accessories, and the furniture rental company came and picked up the furniture. No hassle to the builder. If the buyer had wanted the house fully furnished, both the furniture company and I had given the builder inclusive prices.

For additional photos of this project, please link to: http://letmeorganizeyou.typepad.com/photos/portfolio/index.html

My second builder client hired me early in the building process. As part of my services, I helped pick out the fittings and finishes for the house, so that the style of the fixtures and the furniture and accessories would coordinate. This included kitchen cabinets, kitchen hardware, granite countertops, floor finishes, taps, bathroom tile, vanities, lighting fixtures (interior and exterior), sinks, house numbers, mailboxes, etc... I also chose the paint colors. And all within the builder's budget. Once the house was done, it looked like an integrated whole, and again, it looked like Pottery Barn exploded inside the house.

An additional benefit of hiring a home stager rather than an interior designer for model homes is that home stagers really understand how to highlight the features of a home. And they do it in such a way that will make the home appeal to a broader audience and sell faster. And for more money.