Thomas Scott - Showhomes

Wow, what a view!

Showhomes Orange County's Jill Cosby staged this spectacular home this week and check out the amazing view:

Nice work! I'd expect this home to sell quickly, even in the southern CA real estate market.

You can follow Jill on twitter: @jillcosby and follow me as well: @showhomesthomas

Thomas Scott

www.showhomes.com

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Carla and Jonathan Cheifetz recently opened a Showhomes franchise in Princeton, NJ after both lost their jobs and became frustrated with the lackluster job market. Jonathan, a former Wall Street executive and Carla, previously the director of a non-profit, both lost their jobs during the economic downturn of 2008. Both looked for new jobs for months before deciding to take their careers in a new direction.

“I was very impressed that Showhomes has been around for 23 years,” Carla says. “It’s an especially effective solution in our Northeast housing market, where many homeowners are incredibly frustrated because their properties have lingered on the market for so long. You see vacant homes for sale on every street – the opportunity for this business in this region is huge.”

Jonathan Cheifetz agrees. “We are working with one client whose home has been on the market for six years,” Jonathan says. “She sat down and cried when she found us.”

As the economy sputters into the final quarter of 2009, the high-end real estate market is still in the dumps. While sales of lower end, entry-level homes have increased, sales of homes over $500,000 are moving at a glacial pace – if at all.

Here's some of Carla and Johnathon's work on a contemporary home that was difficult to show when vacant with marble floors and echo filled spaces and now looks uber - modern:

Great home staging work!

What do you think?

www.showhomes.com

On a trip to Chicago to visit our four Showhomes offices last week, I toured this beautiful $890k home in Elmhurst staged by Showhomes' Laura Johnson. This home, like most staged by Showhomes comes with a live-in home stager who takes care of the home and makes sure it is in show-to-sell condition when it is shown.

Laura amazed our office by staging this home within 24 hours of move-in. This is not a small home and every room in the home is fully staged. When I toured the home and shot these photos, all that remained was to hang some art and finish off some of the key accesories.

This home is one of a pair of new contruction homes we are staging for a builder. Both homes are really well built and now that they are staged we're excited about creating some fast sales to jupstart the market. So far this year, we've helped our Realtors clients sell almost 200 homes like this in price segments that have little activity. Take a look and let us know what you think!

www.showhomes.com

Great story on using lived in home stagers from South Florida:

When attorney Alan Shuminer started looking for a house to rent, he came across a listing that he thought was a typo: $2,800 per month for a five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot home with a pool in High Pines, a high-end area near South Miami.

I thought there was a 1 missing, that it was $12,800, he said. But I called to check.

The price, about one-third the rent the house would normally fetch, was correct. The catch: He needed to have nice furniture, let agents show the house to prospective buyers on short notice, and be willing to move out quickly if the house sold.

In order to live in the house which is listed for sale at $1.75 million Shuminer would need to become a home manager, an industry term for specialized temporary renters, also known as live-in stagers.Shuminer said it was the first time he had heard of a home manager but decided it was a perfect fit for him. After going through a recent divorce, he wanted time to figure out his next step and didnt want to commit to a lease.

I decided it was a good transition for me, he said. And I get a much nicer home than what I would normally be able to get for that price. The house next-door rents for $7,500.

Shuminer said he didnt mind spending approximately $9,000 on new furniture because he was going to need it anyway. He moved in to the new home last weekend.

LIVED-IN LOOK

Live-in staging is gaining popularity in South Florida, as a large inventory of high-end homes languishes on the market.

Developers and other owners of vacant high-end homes want to go beyond the standard staging where they rent or buy furniture to decorate the house. They want people living in the homes.Real estate experts say a well-maintained, nicely furnished house thats occupied creates a warm, pleasant atmosphere for potential buyers. That not only helps the house sell quicker and for a higher price but also reduces the owners expenses.

It creates value for homeowners, said Marisa Salas, owner of Showhomes, a home staging franchise in Coral Gables. When a house remains empty, it slowly deteriorates.

The owner of the house doesnt get rent, Salas said. The monthly fee paid by temporary residents goes toward maintaining the house. The home manager is entitled to 30 minutes notice when agents want to show the house and typically gets about a 30-day move-out notice, depending on the contract.

Salas said most of her clients are builders, but she plans to target banks that have growing portfolios of foreclosed homes.

Salas receives a fee based on the sale price when the house sells. The fee for a $1 million house would be about $7,500 to $8,000. The fee is separate from the brokers commission.

Home staged by Showhomes Coral Gables

MARKETING TOOL

Live-in staging is a concept that first emerged in the 1980s during the saving-and-loans crisis, when the federal government became the owner of thousands of homes after a series of bank failures.

It was such an effective marketing tool, and here we are again in a very similar situation, said Valerie Szymaniak of Boca Raton.

Szymaniak recently launched two Web sites, liveinhomestagers.com and myvacanthouse.com, to match potential home managers with sellers of vacant homes.

While the practice was born more than 20 years ago, most people are completely unaware of it, Szymaniak said. She plans to build a national database of owners of vacant homes and potential stagers.

She said 40 potential stagers have registered profiles on her Web site since it was launched three weeks ago. Live-in home stagers are potentially anyone who is willing to live a flexible lifestyle in exchange for perks, Szymaniak said.

One of the people who helped Szymaniak come up with the idea for the Web site is a friend who was a live-in stager for six years until she recently decided to buy her own house.

Carol Everett said the last house she lived in was a $1.7 million, 5,600-square-foot house in a gated golf-course community in Texas. She paid $1,200 per month to live in that house. She now pays $2,300 a month for her mortgage on a $275,000 home in Austin.

I miss it, she said. I was considering going back to staging.

Everett said occasionally having to pack up and move didnt bother her. Her shortest stay in a house was 2 months, but normally she said she stayed in a home for about a year.

When you start staging, you learn how to pack, she said. I would pack on one day, move on another day and unpack on the third day. I loved the lifestyle. I lived in gated communities, in country-club areas and met people whom I wouldnt meet otherwise.

TRANSITIONAL HOUSING

Salas, who opened her agency in April, said home staging is a good option for people looking for transitional housing, those who dont want to be tied down by a lease, recently divorced people and relocating executives.

The house that Shuminer moved into was previously managed by a Burger King executive who had moved to Miami and wanted to become familiar with the area before purchasing a home, Salas said. The executive lived in the house for three months and later bought a condo by the beach, she said.

Salas and Szymaniak arent the only entrepreneurs betting on the home-staging trend.

Thomas Scott, vice president of operations with Showhomes in Nashville, TN, said the company recently opened an office in Fort Lauderdale and wants to open additional offices throughout the state, where banks are seizing and putting up for sale a record number of houses. The nationally franchised company has locations in 52 markets and is growing rapidly. Currently, Showhomes has offices in Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, St Petersburg, Pasco County and Ft Lauderdale and is seeking franchisees in the Ft Myers, Sarasota, Naples and Pensacola areas.

There is a great demand for that in South Florida, Scott said.

www.showhomes.com

I have been house shopping recently and have been struck by the high number of mobile marketing tactics Realtors are using. Mobile Marketing is a buzzword to catch all of the tools you might use to route traffic to a customer's cell phone. Since our cell phones have almost become our home office, it makes sense that this would work, right?

I'm pretty savy on marketing, social media and technology but I'm old-school when it comes to driving around looking at homes. My wife and I like to grab flyers and keep the flyers as we drive. We make notes on them and keep them in a folder. This helps us remember the details and have it handy in the car when we are out and about.

Because, like many buyers, we rely on the flyer, we both find text messaging for home info hard to love. You have to stop driving and listen to the text, sometimes the text takes too long to get to you and you don't have a way to keep track of the homes you are looking at (prior to working with your Realtor of course.)

Making matters worse, twice recently I've gotten spam calls from mortage folks who are providing the service free to Realtors in hopes of capturing leads.

It's bad enough that I can't get information in the industry standard - the flyer. Worse, now the Realtor is the source of spam and his or her trust level just plummeted. For my wife and I, we have simply started boycotting homes that don't have flyers. Text messaging is nice and could be a helpful addition to using flyers but shouldn't replace the flyers.

What do you think?

Thomas Scott

www.showhomes.com