Time for Texas to CATCH UP!

Florida builders offer to stage customers' old homes

ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
August 19, 2007

Here's the latest come-on Florida home builders are offering potential buyers: Stage your present home.
Pulte Homes and Toll Brothers both are making the offer, saying sign a sales contract with us and we'll pay for the services of a professional home stager to make your current home look great so it will sell faster.
Staging is the art of using furnishings and accessories in a different way to make a home look more attractive. It involves purging clutter, rearranging furniture and highlighting a home's best features without spending a lot of money on new things.
“There's a difference between living in a house and setting it up for sale,” said Deborah Ehrlich of Staging Plus in Hillsborough, Fla., which is providing the staging services for Pulte.
Pulte will contribute a maximum of $2,000 as compensation when the stager does an in-home consultation with sellers for outlays required to comply with the stager's advice, depending on the community and the type of Pulte home they are purchasing.
Toll Brothers offers a similar program, said Tom Wingfield, sales manager at the Estates at Harbour Isles in Apollo Beach, Fla. “If they have to spend money to follow the stager's ideas, we would cover the cost to a certain extent,” depending on the location and price of the Toll Brothers home sellers are buying, he said.
David Leonard is convinced the advice he got from a stager helped him quickly sell his 2-year-old house so he could move ahead with his purchase of a Pulte home. “They brought out things I never would have thought about,” said Leonard, 43.