More sellers turning to professionals to spruce up home for sale Reprinted from the Seattle Times Of course I don't want to spend the money, but we realized that house selling is real competitive." Lisa Newbury Smith is talking about the two-story Victorian in Seattle's desirable Wallingford neighborhood she and her husband, Alexander Smith, are now trying to sell — for the second time. Their first attempt began in April. Mindful that charming old houses like theirs can sell fast, they dressed up much of the interior in new white paint and anticipated a quick sale. "We had a lot of traffic, but we didn't have any offers," Newbury Smith says. That was after 10 weeks. So finally the family, which had already moved into another home, pulled the house off the market temporarily to do what their real-estate agent suggested. They decided to spend the money to hire pros to: Provide advice on ways to cosmetically improve their circa 1900 home's old bones; Temporarily furnish it, much as one would a stage set, to show off its beautifully proportioned dining room, its sunny bedrooms, its romantic yesteryear front porch. "They came through with this great fresh eye and said, 'This needs fixing and this needs fixing and this is what needs to be done,' " says Newbury Smith of the Seattle firm she hired, Little Secrets. "Then they came in with all this great furniture that's never been used, and it makes the house look so much fresher." She calls the result "selling a dream." Competition, creativity It's something uncounted numbers of home sellers are doing in hopes of getting a quick sale for top dollar in a competitive market where sale times are lengthening. Indeed, it's now taking a full two months on average to sell a King County home — versus 46 days last year, according to June statistics from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Little Secrets, owned by the mother/daughter team of Karen and Dominique DeGrace, is one of a growing number of local companies that temporarily decorate homes for sale. Market Ready, owned by Seattleite Leland Davis, specializes in cosmetic fine-tuning to the structure itself. Depending on how extensively they spruce up a house, the work can cost anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars for a basic consultation to many thousands. They can all tell tales of homes they've spruced up returning that investment — and sometimes considerably more. "It increases the possibility" of making a profit, acknowledges Coldwell Banker Bain agent Juanita Bunch. "But frankly it just increases the ability to get it sold because it definitely increases the potential for getting more buyers through. The more people you have interested, the more ability you have to sell it closer to its list price." Both Market Ready and Little Secrets operate with the same basic philosophy: Refurbish a house solely to attract real-estate agents and their buyers — not to please the sellers' tastes. That's the work of interior designers, which they're not. "You live in your house differently than you try to sell it," Karen DeGrace tells her customers. Trained as a carpenter and experienced as a real-estate agent, Davis began readying homes for sale after he saw many sellers "leaving a huge amount of money on the table by not maximizing what needed to be done on their property." Outside input is key Often it was the things that any homeowner becomes blinded to after a while: the mismatched carpeting, the fact that one bathroom has been remodeled but not the other, the finished basement that's been abandoned to jumbled storage. (Just cleaning out that last one and showing how it can be used as an office or other room can be a moneymaker, they all say.) Going into a home, "I look at it like a buyer would look at it," Davis says. And after sprucing up more than 650 residences, he says he has a good idea of what bothers buyers and needs to be remedied — and what efforts are a waste of money. The first step is comparing the home to others for sale nearby. "For a home to make the most money, it doesn't have to be perfect, but it has to be in the top five or 10 percent of homes in that category," he says. Pristine cleanliness, warm colors, a pleasant smell, lack of clutter, and "flow" are all things that can push a home into that top tier. What's flow? It's the absence of what Davis calls "stop points" — or places where buyers are jarred to a stop. Stop points can be lots of things. Rooms with so much furniture or such poorly arranged furniture that they're hard to navigate. Dinged doors and missing molding that make the house look tired and buyers wonder about its underlying maintenance. One big stop point is an unwelcoming entrance. Think shabby front door and lackluster landscaping. Another is mismatched spaces, a common problem in partially remodeled homes. A home "can't be different grades," Davis contends, because "people will feel the rest of the house needs to be brought up to the highest grade," and immediately consider it a fixer. Each job is different "In general, people don't want fixers. Even people who say they do will instead buy one all fixed up. They don't have the time." With that in mind, he approaches each job individually. On one end of the spectrum is a minor cleanup and "maybe showcasing different aspects of the home with what (furnishings) people have already. On the other end is rehabilitating a home suffering from years of deferred maintenance. Most common is a middle approach: updating it with new paint, new flooring and lighting as necessary and then doing the fine tuning, including cleaning. This approach can often compensate for uneven quality in a home. For example, to "match" an older kitchen to an updated bath, he might paint all the kitchen cabinets, add new pulls and choose a counter, sink and flooring in keeping with the style of the home's new bathroom. But he wouldn't gut the kitchen and start again. Indeed, his goal, he says, is to do just enough and not too much — something he's seen homeowners do. Too much, he defines as anything optional that improves a house but doesn't return its cost. Two examples: adding attic insulation and replacing a working furnace with a new high-efficiency one. "They're nice, but they don't make more money on the house. That's because people buy with their emotions. "My goal with each house," explains Davis, "is to maximize the value of the house while keeping in mind that each project actually makes money for my client." That's a balancing act Karen and Dominique DeGrace, of Little Secrets, also strive to achieve. They've spruced up more than 2,000 homes since 1996. Like Davis, the DeGraces also counsel home sellers on what minor repairs and cosmetic improvements make economic sense (although unlike Davis, Little Secrets doesn't actually do that work). And like Davis, the DeGraces are strong proponents of fresh paint. But not any paint. All agree that white walls, which many sellers think will improve their home's marketability, actually don't. "They're very cold," explains Karen. Yellow provides positive accent Better is a soft creamy, slightly beigey yellow. "I've found that about 95 percent of the people who see it like it," notes Davis, "because it doesn't matter if it's cloudy or sunny. It looks good." But when a client's budget doesn't allow a full repaint job, they work around it. Take the Newbury/Smith home, for example. Its dining room had been painted a rich red — a color Karen DeGrace says she'd never choose for a for-sale property because its too individualistic. But the budget wasn't there to repaint it, so DeGrace instead worked with it by choosing soothing putty-green slipcovers for the dining chairs she put in that room. She also had the living room repainted (it had been white) the same greenish hue, which made the white moldings pop out. Then they completely furnished the empty house with items from their Seattle warehouse. It holds enough furniture, artwork and accessories to outfit about 25 houses at a time — right down to the plush bathroom towels. Many of Little Secrets' clients are referred by real-estate agents, including Coldwell Banker Bain's Bunch. She'll suggest a spruce up if a client's belongings don't match the house, if it needs cosmetic improvements or it's empty. "Vacant looks forlorn," she explains. That was the case with Brad and Audrey Cloven's Seattle home, which they sold after their corporate transfer to North Dakota. Their real-estate agent thought they could get $325,000 for it unfurnished. Hoping for more, the Clovens spent $20,000 total to bring in Market Ready and Little Secrets. First Davis painted everything. He replaced mismatched fixtures, replaced the kitchen counter tops, freshened the landscaping and cleaned every possible surface — even pressure-washing the exterior concrete. Then the DeGraces took over. Says Brad Cloven, "They brought in all this furniture and art, things I wouldn't pick because I'm too conservative, but man it looked great." In no time, the house had four offers and sold for $399,950 this spring. Does Brad Cloven think potential buyers were deceived? Not at all. "We didn't sell something that wasn't there," he points out. "We just made it look as good as we could." And best of all, he says he didn't have to do all that work himself.

Little Secrets   ●   1443 Elliott Ave West    ●   Seattle, Washington  ●   206-285-7811