Feng shui staging tips

Book Review
Title: "Sell Your Home Fast in a Buyer's Market: Secrets from an Expert Green Feng Shui Staging Designer"
Author: Norma Lehmeier Hartie
Publisher: Lingham Press, 2010; 232 pages; $17.95 amazon.com

In business, they say that when the market is bad or revenues slow down, entrepreneurs should fight the urge to cut costs when it comes to marketing -- in fact, upping the investment in marketing is one way businesses find they can counteract slow markets.

This counterintuitive truism also applies with real estate. While slow-market sellers generally want and need to pinch pennies, the investment of time, money and effort in strategic home staging often pays off in terms of getting your home sold -- period -- and certainly getting it off the market in a shorter time frame than its non-staged competition.

The aim of Norma Lehmeier Hartie's new book, "Sell Your Home Fast in a Buyer's Market: Secrets from an Expert Green Feng Shui Staging Designer," is to help home sellers use staging to best their homes' competition in a market where buyers have many more homes than normal from which to choose.

In distinguishing this book from the many others on staging, Hartie states that she "departs from traditional staging," which "seems fake." She explains that she will teach readers how to make buyers "want to step into the lifestyle that you have created," which intrigued (and confused) me a bit, as it echoed what Hartie deemed the "fake"-ness of traditional staging.

But Hartie elaborates that her approach to staging is designed to respond to the average buyer's basic senses of sight, sound and smell -- plus the sixth sense of "how it feels," which she addresses using the energetic precepts of feng shui, the ancient Chinese science of placement, aesthetics and energy, or qi ("chi").

Hartie acknowledges up front that price is the No. 1 factor that determines whether your home will sell, lest you think you could list your home at an unjustifiably high price and get it sold fast, just because the feng shui of the place is perfect.

She launches the book with two non-staging-specific chapters on preparing to sell your home, including finding and interviewing agents, creating an action plan, and photographing your home; and smart home pricing -- including a caution against the common trap of overpricing. These sections contain some useful sidebars and interesting insights from active real estate brokers and agents on the home features and pricing considerations in various regions around the country. ...CONTINUED

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