Lemons can add a nice staging touch!
Yesterday I showed the nicest staged home; it was such a pleasure to show. It was not a big home at 1800 square feet but every room was staged to perfection. Staging is becoming more popular all the time and is a wonderful way to show your home off to its best advantage. I do realize that not all sellers are going to want to have their home staged but even if you don’t pay a professional stager there are many things you can do yourself. As I was looking around this home one of the things that dawned on me was that the clutter was missing. It looked like a model home. Now when we opened the garage we found a number of boxes already packed. Having boxes in the garage is no big deal as the buyer can see that the seller is preparing to move from their house.
I thought the cut lemon on the counter was a nice touch. The bowl of lemons has fake lemons in it but there was one half of a lemon cut up and the rest of the lemon was in a pitcher of water. Lemons have such a nice clean smell and it is a natural smell. I have often went in to homes where the candle smell was so strong it made the buyers think the seller was trying to mask some kind of odor.
You can tell from the lemon picture that the counters were relatively clean of clutter. If you notice that I keep talking about clutter I just think that is one of the keys to getting a home sold. When there’s a lot of clutter in a home it is hard to look at the home. Sometimes it is also very nice clutter but the buyer gets so caught up in looking at the stuff they miss the home.
So long story short if you are even thinking about putting your home on the market start thinking about de-cluttering.
Mr. and Mrs. Seller if you are going to all the work to list your house with a REALTOR it is extremely important that you go to the extra work of accepting showings when they are called in. I recently had out of town buyers in for one day only. They gave me a list of 10 homes that they wanted to see. I made my appointments through a showing service with a four hour notice to the seller’s. These were being shown on a Monday in the afternoon. Out of the 10 homes I tried to schedule four sellers declined our showing. Out of the four sellers that declined one of them gave me a legitimate reason; they were taking their house off of the market. I can understand that things change and better they cancel than my clients fall in love with a house that is no longer on the market. Since these were out of town buyers I decided to call the rest of the agents directly to see if they could talk their clients in to letting me show the homes. 
think the agent must have had a heart to heart talk with their seller. This was a new listing and the agent quickly called me back and said yes her clients would be happy for us to see the home. The photographer was still there when we arrived but it was no big deal it was easy for us to stay out of his way.
showing service that the appointment has been declined by the seller. Even though our Northwest Houston market has not been affected by the economy as much as many other areas of the United States, we still have a lot of houses on the market and not as many buyers are able to get financing as in previous years. 
When you are putting your house up for sale there are certain things you can’t change. You are going to have to live with your location, the size of your yard, your floor plan, what other homes in your neighborhood are selling for. There are however certain things that you can do to stage your home to get top dollar. 
of old and new homes; parts of the neighborhood being a little more run down.. The second home was in a newer neighborhood. When I ran comparatives I found that this floor plan typically sold for about $10,00 more in the newer neighborhood. 
should have sold for more than the home in the older neighborhood. In this case what ended up happening was the home in the older neighborhood sold for more than the home in the newer neighborhood.
