« Builder hates Toronto's proposed tax | Main | Toronto's new taxes still in question »

A gnome-free zone

Curb appeal is key in the real estate game. Now, home stagers are taking their act to your tacky front yard and turning it into a temporary oasis that's prepped to sell

So, you think you're ready to sell your house. You've stored away all the personal knick-knacks, scrubbed the counters until they sparkle and arranged the furniture to maximize the open space. But before you hang that "for sale" sign, take a look out the window. Are weeds poking through the cracks between your cobblestones? Is the paint on your front door chipped and gloomy? Was Paul Martin prime minister the last time you pruned your shrubs?

You may just need a garden fluffer. This new breed of real estate professional will banish your tacky backyard gnomes and make your lawn look like Eden - at least for the open house. Now that home staging has become standard practice for selling a house, the industry is branching out into gardens, front porches and decks.

Lack of curb appeal is deadly in real estate, stagers warn. First impressions start outside, and those weekends you spent drywalling the basement won't pay off if potential buyers don't make it past the ugly planters on your front porch.

"I've seen people who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars improving the inside, and you wouldn't know it walking up to their home," says Luanne Kanerva, principal designer at Katu Design in Toronto. "People will drive by, so you want to make sure you get them in."

Ms. Kanerva and others say the demand for garden fluffing is steadily growing; many home stagers include curb appeal in their standard service, which can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. Ms. Kanerva recommends spending about 1 per cent of the sale price on staging, inside and out.

A small investment can pay off big time, says Michelle Brennan, a garden stager based in St. Catharines, Ont. She recalls one home in Burlington, Ont., that languished on the market for three months. Ms. Brennan replaced an old concrete walkway with a curved interlock path, flanked it with flower beds and planted lavender on a bare side patio to give visitors a fresh scent when they walked by. The owners followed her recommendations to repaint the tired green front door a more modern-looking charcoal and added flower boxes on the windows. The home went back on the market and sold in weeks.

Even picture-perfect gardens can use a little fluff. Karen Cole, an interior decorator, has an English garden to swoon over and an immaculate deck overlooking Wellesley Park in Toronto's Cabbagetown neighbourhood. But as she prepared to put her house up for sale this week, she took some tips from Ms. Kanerva. On the stager's advice, Ms. Cole rearranged the outdoor chairs and tables into smaller, conversation-friendly groups, power-washed the deck and added some bright pink petunias in the back.

Not every fluff job is as easy as Ms. Cole's, of course. A home stager's role is part designer, part diplomat. They must persuade sellers to adopt a look that appeals to the majority of buyers without saying flat out that their rusty porch swing will send prospects running back to the MLS.

"You have to be very careful," Ms. Kanerva says. "You might say, 'This chair on the front porch has seen better days, can we take it away?' and they'll say, 'Oh, that's my father's chair, all my memories are of him sitting in this chair.' "

In a case like that, she says, she'd gently explain that perhaps they could find a better (less conspicuous) place for dear daddy's chair; in a pinch, she may suggest the sellers remove a sentimental family heirloom so that the buyers aren't so taken by its beauty that they want to include it in the sale.

"People have to let go of their homes in order to sell them," Ms. Kanerva says.

Garden fluffing isn't just for homes with big yards or, indeed, with any yard at all.

Designer Lisa Aiken has staged several terraces and balconies, and says making the most of small outdoor spaces can help sell condominiums. "It really does make a difference," says Ms. Aiken, owner of Terra Firma Home and Terrace Design in Toronto. "Savvy homeowners are catching on to the fact that outside sells just as much as inside."

While some garden stagers will plant flowers, most use box planters, fancy patio furniture, potted flowers, stylish umbrellas and even mirrors to create a temporary garden paradise that can be packed up and moved out when the house sells.

"Landscaping is long term, staging is instant," Ms. Aiken explains. "I don't plant, I just make it look like I have."

That doesn't mean garden staging is all trickery, though. Ms. Kanerva often defends herself to friends who accuse her of pulling the lavender-scented wool over buyers' eyes. Staging, she says, is all about creating a sense of possibility: See what you can do with this fabulous yard?

"They think it really only benefits the seller, but it also benefits the buyer, because buyers see potential in a house they might otherwise have not considered," Ms. Kanerva says.

Turn your pad into a palace

Professional garden fluffers offer these tips for improving your home's curb appeal:

On that note, send the garden gnomes into storage. Sorry guys, but your gnarled little faces just don't sell real estate.

June 26, 2007 in Selling Toronto Real Estate | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c51e453ef00e00987a5e18833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A gnome-free zone:

Comments

Hey, I like garden gnomes! What about pink flamingos?

Seriously, folks, I think the garden gnomes is a great idea. Curb appeal is 90% of the sale. How do I find "garden fluffers" in Minnesota? Is there some sort of organization or association?

Posted by: Kermit Johnson | Jun 29, 2007 8:55:55 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

 

Thank you for visiting!