Striving to create a better life for everyone by sustainably solving real estate problems

(512) 807-8777

Category Archives: Home Staging

The Wandering Mangums

Here’s the house we are moving out of. We’ll miss this pool!

Sue Ann has mentioned a couple of times that my husband, Russell, and I have been moving frequently since we moved out of the main Villa Park house. I hear some of you are curious as to what exactly we’re doing with our vagabond ways, so I’m here to fill you in!

When Sierra moved off to college, we decided to downsize. We had just finished a “homestead flip,” where we bought a house, fixed it up, and sold it for a good profit. The next house we found didn’t work out (Kerrville Folkways), and we were looking to try something new and fun and to learn more about the greater Austin, Texas area.

We ended up signing with an innovative company called Showcase Properties of Austin (also known as Dream Home Manager), which specializes in helping sell high-end properties in this area for clients who are having trouble selling them because no one is currently living there.  According to them:

“It is a fact that vacant listings look & show better when they are staged and at Showcase Properties, we are passionate about assisting you in doing just that with our no cost solution. Statistics show that a finely staged and manicured home sells 70-80% faster and for 13% more money than an equivalent vacant home.”

That’s where we come in! The company finds qualified people (they call them Home Managers) who will rent the homes at a substantial discount, stage them with their own furnishings, and keep the house ready to show at an hour’s notice. With my background in home decorating and real estate, I was confident we had the ideal kind of furnishings to help sell a house, so I knew we were the perfect candidates for this job! And since Russell and I have spent our married lives moving around for the military and his work, we are comfortable pulling up stakes and starting again. Russ says he likes it because, “It makes you weed out your crap!” We’ve become very good at not holding onto stuff.

You can see how this works out well for home sellers, too. The property is rented and someone else helps with the utilities, plus you don’t have to keep checking to keep the house show-ready.

When a house sells, we get 30 days’ notice, look through the available Showcase Properties homes, and find a new place to live! After the initial move-in when we we started out, they pay for movers to switch houses.

Continue reading →

20Shares

Carol Saves the Day at Villa Park

You may remember our Villa Park casita, where Anita and I lived last year, and which had the most disaster-fraught renovation in history. We rebuilt this little house completely, saving only the shell of the outside (the city required we keep the dimensions and roofline). We even installed a new, real, foundation to replace the three slabs with no rebar and no plumbing it previously had.

We had a hard time renting it out last year, because we were unable to stage it once we moved to the Bobcat Lair, and people being unhappy that it shared the yard with the house in front. But, when we did get a fence and all that, we got some really great renters who were settling in nicely. One of them even got an award at the local elementary school.

Unfortunately, the other renter got a great job promotion that required moving to scenic Bentonville, Arkansas (there are other companies besides Wal-Mart there). We certainly didn’t want to force them to stay, so Carol jumped on getting it rented again.

Why it worked this time

We were motivated, because if we couldn’t get it rented, the renters would have to pay until we did, but if we rented it quickly, their initial deposit would cover that. Carol got to work and made this nice Facebook ad:

You get a screenshot, because I can’t make it play here.

Click the link to see it live, I hope.

https://www.facebook.com/BigAustinHome/videos/1800913923318570/

We all shared it everywhere we possibly could. People lined up to see the space (literally, four families went to see it in 15-minute intervals), and it was rented in just a few days to some other fine folks with no kids and no pets! Hooray!

It worked because the tenants had decorated the casita nicely, which showed how well it “lived.” The current tenants cleaned it up (they were motivated) to perfection, so people just loved the place.

That’s a real lesson to remember: staging truly helps sell or rent houses. I now really wish I’d done a better job the first time.

We sure appreciate Carol’s hard work to get the casita rented so fast! Lee and I won’t even notice a drop in our cash flow. Win!

18Shares

What? Open Floor Plans Have Flaws?

These convenient double doors allow us to ban the canines from the room with the good furniture in it, so I can retreat and relax in a space that doesn’t resemble a doggie daycare.

You may have noticed that we don’t always make completely open floor plans in houses we renovate. Sometimes that’s because of budget issues, but sometimes it’s because we really feel like a house needs a separate room or two. How come?

There are lots of reasons.

  • Perhaps you’d like a separate, quiet space for reading or studying.
  • Maybe, like us, you have dogs that you’d like to easily confine to just one part of the house (at the Hermits’ Rest house, the den and guest room are easily closed off, as is the master, leaving the very sturdy great room for the pups).
  • You might want to listen to music, or perform music without the echoes of a huge room with hard walls and floors.
  • Or, you could be a messy cook (I solved that problem at the ranch house by putting a bar-height wall between the kitchen and the living/dining area, so you see the pretty cabinets and backsplash, but not the dishes that haven’t been washed yet.

The Academics Have Also Noticed!

Apparently, we aren’t the only ones rethinking the beloved open concept concept. Lee sent me this link to a very recent article by Ian Bogost (he’s a professor of media stuff!) in The Atlantic, called The Curse of an Open Floor Plan.

In practice, open-plan design has always been a stage to a quiet struggle between freedom and servitude.
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, May 17, 2018

This article provides a great, scholarly introduction to how open floor plans came to be common in the twentieth century, with architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and others leading the way. It also pointed out that kitchen access in 60s suburban plans wasn’t originally to showcase your white cabinets and backsplash, but so Mom could keep an eye on the kids while she toiled away in her “domain.”

Continue reading →

18Shares

Can Curb Appeal Go too Far?

deck

This deck added a lot of curb appeal to the Lakeland house.

There are a couple of reasons I’ve been thinking about curb appeal lately. One is that a friend got into a bidding war over a suburban house that was builder-grade on the inside, but had an amazing back yard paradise, and a beautifully designed front yard, too. People were falling in love with that setup.

I began to wonder whether the potential buyers had thought about the maintenance that koi pond, gazebo, bird house collection, and dramatic planting collection was going to require. I know my friends were aware, but I bet a lot of people just thought the curb appeal was magic.

But It’s Good to Have a Garden, Right?

We’d just received a request to link to an article from the Loyal Gardener blog, on reasons why having a garden will sell your house. That also got me thinking. The gardeners make a lot of sense, because of course beautiful and well maintained plantings add value to a house, entice potential buyers, and increase home values. I’m not arguing with that.

But, sometimes curb appeal attempts can backfire. Here’s what I’ve observed:

Continue reading →

32Shares

Who Needs Staging? Probably You

The perfect accessories make this bathroom in Oakridge inviting.

If you are a human being of a “certain age,” and if you have looked at houses for sale in the past few years, you may have noticed a change. Back in the olden days of yore (like the twentieth century), people did one of two things when they put their homes on the market:

  1. They cleaned them really well and got rid of random junk. Then they mowed the yard.
  2. They moved out, then cleaned the house up. If they had a room painted by a teenager, they painted it white.

After that, an agent showed people houses, or people called your agent to see the house, and it got sold. You then moved into a new house, which you fixed up to your own taste.

Not Today

Today, if you want to sell a house at retail (not the ones WE are looking for), people feel compelled to do so much more. They put most of their things in storage, especially anything that makes it look like an actual family lives there, they replace anything in the house that is over 5 years old, because it might bring the dreaded word “dated” to the lips of potential buyers, and of course they paint every surface a neutral color, and if possible, remove anything resembling carpet in the house. You then put strategically placed objects around the house to make it appealing. That’s called staging.

Continue reading →

16Shares