Home Staging Pennsylvania- Hart & Associates Servicing the Main Line, Philadelphia, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties.

As a home staging and design expert in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, I know how important it is for my clients to get the look they want in their homes without breaking the bank.  We all love the rooms we see in design magazines but creating that same room can cost a fortune! Real people have real budgets and if you are a busy mom like me you understand how important convenience and cost are to getting a job done.

I am excited to announce my new blog Open House for Main Line Today magazine. Main Line Today magazine is the authority for life and culture in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Weekly I will do your homework for you and explore local stores and resources and let you know where to go to get the best deals and looks for your home. Make sure to check it often and subscribe so you do not miss my design ideas! Click here to read my latest post. I look forward to hearing from you. KH

 

  

Last month I did an office presentation for a  local Long and Foster Office in Wayne Pennsylvania. I was not there to talk about home staging- I was asked to do a one hour seminar on blogging! Why blogging? The office manager had seen my blogs on home staging and the local real estate market in the Active Rain newsletter and realized that I must have been doing something right to get my posts noticed.  His Realtors could use some advice on how to blog to grow their business and called me in to "talk blogging".

If someone had told me 2 years ago that I would spend almost nothing on marketing and rely on 4 blogs to promote my business I would have thought they were crazy.

 You see as a small business owner I have tried a lot of strategies to advertise my business. As a home staging expert and small business coach I get calls daily from stagers asking for advice on how to advertise their business. My response:

• Newspaper ads- They are expensive and do not get results. I once spent $300 per week on ads and ran them for 6 weeks- I did not get one single call! Not even from friends that saw them.

 

• Glossy Brochures- They are gorgeous but expensive to create and even more exhausting and time consuming to distribute to offices. If you can get past the gate keepers at the front desk you can put them in the agents mail boxes. If you cannot you risk the chance of them getting tossed. I have seen receptionists throw mine away and have gone back into the office to remove them from the trash- if you have $50.00 to toss in the trash can let me know!

 

• Trade-shows- They are fun and exciting but expensive! I once spent $5,000 (you read that right) on a booth, materials, staging props, and hotel fees. The result? 21 phone calls from people wanting to become a home stager. Maybe I am in the wrong business.

 

• Grocery Carts- Sure the glamour shots are fun to look at when you shop but no one actually writes the name and number down! They are expensive too- $2000 for 6 months for one store!

So what can you do to market yourself in your local area for FREE?

Become a local home staging expert by blogging about your accomplishments as a home staging professional. If you are just starting out stage a room in your own home or better yet a friend's home, even better a friend that is a Realtor's home and write about that. Make sure to get a testimonial from that Realtor friend!

If you are an established business owner make sure to blog about the homes you stage and include photos and the name of the town and state that the home was in. Add the town to the title of the blog, the text of the blog and the blog tags. This way google will notice this info when it crawls the site. I love using Active Rain and Stage it Forward to catch up on the latest in the home staging industry but I also rely on it as a tool to market my business. When clients call me, 9 times out of 10 they have found my blog before my website using the keywords that I use in my blogs.

If you already have a blog on Active Rain consider becoming a blogging expert on a local website. I have blogged nationally about home staging for sites such as HomeGoods Stores and locally I now blog about design for Main Line Today Magazine.I do not talk specifically about staging but I use that blog as a way to promote myself as a local staging expert.

As small business owners we wear many hats- office managers, warehouse managers, human resource managers, and sales and marketing departments. Blogging is a fun and FREE way that you can promote your home staging business. I look forward to reading yours! kh

 

 

Today our team had the opportunity to stage a wonderful new construction home in Havertown Pennsylvania. The builder did an outstanding job selecting the finishes and materials and the home has every feature a growing family would need. The home builder and Realtor realized however that this home needed to stand out amongst other homes in the same price point and decided to use staging as part of their marketing plan. 

Last week we toured the home and today we brought in a few key items to stage the main living areas. The result? The home looks warmer and more inviting. Take a peek for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite things about being a home staging professional is the dramatic transformation that occurs when a home is staged.

Our team recently had the pleasure of getting a large contemporary home in Villanova Pennsylvania ready to sell. It is a spacious home with 8 bedrooms including an inlaw suite, a full finished basement and many rooms for entertaining. We started this project by providing the owner with a consulation for some minor updates that needed to be made and then added the final touches by staging a few key rooms to show buyers how they could enjoy this luxury home with their family. The result? The home looks warmer and more inviting.

Take a look for yourself.

Many clients think that home staging is an expensive investment. They imagine truckloads of furniture and accessories being brought into their home and even more truckloads of their personal items being removed before their home can be shown. The truth is that for most furnished homes, home staging is not about what is added to your home. It is about how you can enhance your home's selling features and showcase the space your home offers by removing personal items and rearranging some furniture items to create more flow with in the home.

Last week our team helped a client near Philadelphia in Gladwyne Pennsylvania get his resale home ready for sale. This home had previously been on the market for 9 months and now he was considering staging to give it a new look. The client preferred his home to have a "historically accurate look" and a lot of his items did not have the "on-trend" look buyers prefer. Instead of bringing in new items, we removed a lot of his personal treasures to better highlight his home's architectural features.

He was very similar to most of our clients- he had lived in his home for over 40 years, had amassed quite a collection of items and lived in his home the way that worked best for his needs. Now that he was downsizing we needed to show younger families how his home would work for them.

We arrived at the home at 9:00 am and completed the job by 3:00 pm. The results were amazing! We used what he had, decluttered the rooms to remove his personal items, and created spaces that had a new purpose such as turning the once cluttered guest room below into a child's room (using antique toys!)

He was pleased and surprised by the results. He had loved living in his home the way he lived there but understood why we made the changes we did. The home goes back on the market today and I will keep you posted on when he gets an offer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home Staging is not just about depersonalizing and decluttering. One of the main goals of home staging is to show the best purpose for a space so buyers can envision how they can live in a home.

Our team recently staged a home in Wayne Pennsylvania that needed our services to make sense of the floor plan- the previous owner had designed a spectacular great room for hosting lavish parties. This large room was almost half the square footage of the rest of the home! It featured double French doors that opened to the patio and pool area, a gorgeous bar for entertaining, a raised platform perhaps for dancing and 2 other large sitting rooms.  The previous owner had a very good purpose in mind when he planned this room- he was the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles and used this space to have parties for the team and watch games on the large screen tv that came down from the ceiling! This may have suited his needs but most buyers today would have no idea of how to use this space for their family!

In order to make sense of this space we staged it to show buyers how they could enjoy using this room. In my fantasy world I wish we could have used a pool table, baby grand piano and a karaoke stage but on the limited budget we had, I think we did this room justice and better allowed buyers to see how they can call this palace home!

 

Looking for ways to design your home on a budget? Are you selling your home or downsizing and need to sell your pre-owned furniture?

Then click here to view Action News reporter Nydia Han's latest segment of Saving with 6 ABC. She will feature local staging expert Kate Hart and business owner Chip Addis of Random Pieces- a pre-owned furniture store.

Often when Kate is staging a home her clients have furniture items that they do not want to take with them to their new home. Chip has created a business where he purchases higher end furniture and resells it during his warehouse sales twice a month. For more information visit his site at www.random-pieces.com