RE: Real Estate Podcast

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (00:14)
Welcome to another episode of the RE Real Estate Podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Clint Galliano and the other host is Ben Harang How you doing, Ben?

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (00:25)
Good afternoon, Clint. I'm doing terrific, man. How you doing today?

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (00:29)
I'm doing wonderful, Ben. We're sitting here and if we look familiar, well, you should know our faces, but we're recording a second episode today because I'm going be out of town next week. We're doing a music tour, going to visit my daughters because they've got concerts going on and then my wife's...

performing in a concert in Lafayette and they have a dress rehearsal one day and then the concert's the next. So I'm gonna be out of town on our next scheduled recording date. So recording an extra episode tonight or today. All right, Ben. Well, right now it's time for our featured listing of the week. Pause.

That was a pretty nice listing I've been.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (01:11)
It sure was Clint. Maybe one of us can sell it.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (01:14)
I would hope so. Well, depending on whose listing it is and what it is, I don't know if I can sell it, but we'll figure it out. All right, Ben, what are we talking about today?

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (01:18)
Yeah

All right. We're going to talk about staging a house on a budget. You know, if I told you the secret to selling your house faster isn't a thousand dollar renovation, but how you arrange the throw pillows in your house. Yeah. Imagine that. Today we'll be demystifying home staging and showing you how to get the model home look without breaking the bank.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (01:39)
What?

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (01:51)
So staging isn't about hiding any flaws. Staging is about accenting the strengths of your house. We'll cover three of the most important things you can do for free that had the biggest impact. We'll show you how to use the furniture you already own to make the rooms look bigger. And finally, we'll share our favorite cheap tricks by adding that finishing sparkle touch.

By the end, you'll have a practical checklist to make buyers fall in love with your space. so here, the, the three D's, this is just so true, Clint. the declutter, the depersonalize and the deep clean. you know, we see, we see people put monuments to their family.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (02:26)
I get smart.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (02:43)
on the hall, wall, and the house. And if you ever told Mama Bear she needed to take the pictures of her family down before she moves out, you hadn't lived until you do that. They want to fight you. But you want to depersonalize it because, it's not just because I don't like your family pictures, I love your family pictures. Put them in a box now.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (02:55)
yeah.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (03:05)
Cause you're going to have to put them in a box when you move anyway. Put them in a box now. Cause what you don't see as the owner, people walk into the house and it is personal pictures on the wall. They'll, they'll look up and say, I know those people, they live here. I didn't know this was their house. and they're not looking at the house. We want them to imagine being in their house, not visiting your house.

So that's the power of depersonalize. I tell people if they don't know you live here, I want nothing in the house that will tell them who lives here. They, I don't want you to leave a clue that you live here. so that that's the deep depersonalizing the declutter. And I look around and I have some clutter in my, in my space right now, but the declutter, some, some, some spaces,

You can't put a water bottle down on a counter because there's no space for it. There is something in every square inch. not necessarily the kitchen, although the kitchen can be cluttered, but you walk into a living room or a den or a dining room or any room in the house and you literally can't put a, a water bottle down on, on a flat surface. It makes the house look small.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (04:05)
I feel attacked.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (04:26)
it makes it feel cramped. So clear the, the counter spaces, clear the flat horizontal spaces. And less is more. Get another box and put some of that Driga in the box and put it in the storage until we sell the house. the third D is a deep clean.

It's amazing what a deep clean in a bathroom will do or a deep clean in a kitchen or the den or the dining room. You have stuff on the floor or spills on the counters or something that I'm going get to that next week. Just get it done and make it, try your best to make it look like nobody lives there because life happens and stuff gets left out that gets left on the counter, spills happen.

not wiped up like it could be or should be. but get it, get it clean and as sanitized as you can. And by that, mean, make it look like nobody lives there. Um, and I know it's a pain in the neck every day when you need to go to work to have your house show ready. But since Clint and I started, started this podcast today, I got a message that somebody wanted to see a listing within an hour. Um, so it does happen.

We asked for lead time, but they wanted to go within the hour. And the house is vacant and it's ready to go. So it wasn't a problem, but I knew the house was ready to go. But if you're living in the house and you at work all day, your goal should be to get your house show ready before you leave in the morning. Whether or not we have a scheduled showing, because the last thing you want to do is have to run home and make the bed or pick up dirty clothes.

Whatever it is you left undone in the morning before you rushed off to work because you were running late and overslept. It's a collaborative effort. It's our job to market the property. It needs to be presentable. And the more presentable you can make it, the better off you're going to be in the long run.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (06:32)
And then along those lines, another tip is closets come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are shallow and wide. Some of them are walk-in closets. Some of them are something in between. A way to make the closet seem bigger, if it's not so big, is to pick up everything off of the floor.

If you got to spread it out, stick it in the attic, whatever you have to do, get everything off of the floor and it's going to make that closet seem a lot bigger because hey, you can see the floor in it. There's all kinds of space in here.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (07:11)
Right. And we're not hiding anything. We're just trying to show the house. And if it's cluttered, people can't see how big it really is. So we can't make your house any bigger than it is, but we can sure make it feel every bit as big as it is.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (07:25)
out. All right, so once you got it cleaned out and you got a blank slate, let's talk about furniture. So your goal is to maximize the feeling of the space. Pull your furniture away from the walls to create a more intimate conversational grouping. You want to ensure that there are clear logical walking paths through the room. If you have to turn sideways to get past a coffee table, that's a little too crowded.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (07:50)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (07:50)
So

remove any oversize or unnecessary pieces and kind of go with less is always more in staging concerns. You want to give every room a purpose. So don't leave buyers guessing as to what the room is used for. So that's the biggest thing when I'm walking buyers through a house when that's empty and not staged is, well, I guess this one is a dining room, but.

You know, we're not quite sure on this and this is probably the living room, but we don't really know. So you kind of want to.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (08:27)
Yeah. When, when, when did,

when did I give away Clint is if you hit, hit your head on the chandelier in the room, it's the dining room because that's where the table goes.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (08:33)
probably the dining room. That's Yep. And

I was getting ready to say that because I say if there's a chandelier hanging, then it's probably the dining area. So you could put a table under it. So but you kind of want to, with staging, you want to, you know, put a dining room table there under the chandelier. You know, now you know where to put the dining room table. It goes under the chandelier. You got another room that doesn't have a chandelier. It's got a ceiling fan instead. That's probably the living room.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (08:55)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (09:02)
You know, so you want to make sure that with your furniture and everything that you're staging with, that you're giving the impression this is this room. You know, you don't have to think about it. You don't have to do metal acrobatics to figure it out. It makes it easy. So if you've got a study, you know, a room that's being used as an office, a desk and a lamp and a chair. And it's, it's as simple as that.

Quick pro tip, if you're using area rugs, make sure they're big enough for the space. So if you put a two-foot diameter rug in an eight-foot room, that's not going to make a whole lot of sense. So you want something that's going to make it cover up a good bit of the space. It's OK to have some floor exposed around the rug, but you don't want a two-foot rug in the middle of a big room. Exactly.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (09:51)
You don't want the rug to be swallowed up.

So you were talking about placing furniture and need a path. A recent house I sold, the buyers measured their furniture, cut their furniture size out on a brown paper, three foot tall roller brown paper, and brought the sofa, brought the love seat, the two recliners, brought the end tables, brought the sofa table.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (09:54)
All right.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (10:20)
brought the hutch and laid it down on the floor so they could see how much room they had or didn't have when the furniture was there. It was single dimensional on the floor, but I've never seen somebody go to that extent to make sure it fits. ⁓ I do.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (10:37)
I like that. I'm going to steal that

and tell that to buyers that have their furniture and plan on moving with it. That if they do that, that because this is a problem that comes up all the time is will my bedroom set fit? Will my sofa fit? You know, that was one of the houses that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. That was another of the questions outside of the lipstick on a pig finish in the house.

was that, our sofa and our love seat and our recliners is not going to fit in this quote unquote living room space. And so that was part of what also turned them off about that house. So doing something like that, that's simple enough to do. They can cut out the shapes, they can roll them up and stick them in their trunk. And then when they go to a house and if they like it, they can go grab that out of the trunk and lay it out on the floor.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (11:12)
Mm-hmm.

You're right. didn't

think about doing any multiple houses, but that's their furniture. can put it down on whatever house they think they're interested in.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (11:39)
Yeah, so I'm going

to add that to my buyer presentation.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (11:43)
There you go. We learned something today. We can go home now.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (11:46)
It's almost time.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (11:47)
Yeah, getting there. ⁓

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (11:51)
All

right. I'm starting to think that we like to say this phrase, let there be light.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (11:56)
I think you like to say that.

Yeah, go ahead. Tell them what you want to light up.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (12:00)
All right.

All right. So again, lighting makes a lot of difference. So you want to make sure that all your blinds and curtains are open and let the natural light in to the rooms. If you're listing and you have the real estate photographer come through your house and take pictures, that's going to be the first thing they do is they're going to open up the curtains. They're going to lift the blinds or at least

open the blinds enough to where you've got natural light coming into the room. For showings, you want to make sure that all the lights are on in the house. So if you're at home just prior to a showing, turn on all lights in the house. Even lamps in the middle of the day, it doesn't matter. The more light there is, the easier it is to show off the appeal of the house. It makes the house feel warm and inviting and

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (12:43)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (12:46)
You also want to go through and replace all of your bulbs in your house with the same type of bulbs. I don't know how many listings I've been on showing buyers and they've got a twisted up fluorescent bulb and a clear LED bulb and a frosted LED bulb and you know, all these different types of bulbs and all the way from a soft glow white

to a daylight bulb. And my personal preference, change out all of your bulbs for daylight bulbs and do the ones with the frosted globes. Or not frosted, but not the clear glass or plastic. Yeah, go with the frosted and put that in all of the fixtures. The only time where you wanna go with the clear glass is if you've got the...

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (13:20)
Mm-hmm.

Not the clear, right. Right.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (13:37)
the light fixtures that are kind of like the open stylized fixtures doesn't really have a shade, then I find the clear bulbs look good in those. Other than that, go with the frosted bulbs or the opaque bulbs, probably a better word, and go with the daylight brightness bulbs throughout the house. It helps the house seem brighter. Some people like a cozy feeling and all.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (13:54)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (14:03)
But when people walk through a house, they want to be able to see what's in the house. That's one thing I hate about hotel rooms is that there's never enough light. You can turn on all the lamps and everything and you still can't see nothing. I don't want to know what they're hiding.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (14:11)
Yeah, they're hiding something from you though. They're hiding from you.

You're right. don't. You're right. All right. So let's talk about the, the budget. The, can, you can spend a little bit of money, things like buying a fresh set of towels for the primary bedroom, primary bathroom for display only to hang on the towel racks. Don't use them.

You're going have to wash them. Use your own towels. You think of those as decoration, not useful. But that way you always have a clean towel, clean towels hanging on the rack. And go buy some colorful throw pillows for your sofa and just place them on the sofa. Those two things tastefully cover.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (14:56)
Tastefully colored.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (14:58)
You're right. My bad. Don't get purple, green and orange.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (15:04)
Unless it's Halloween and they're

decorative.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (15:08)
Yeah. but just think those two things will kind of brighten up the house, make it easier on you when you are getting, getting ready to go to work. Yeah. Your bathroom is, is done when you pick up the, the dirty clothes and towels from the night before that morning. And, you have clean towels hanging. You don't have to take them, take them out, recycle them. You just, you just can't grab those off the, off the rack when you need a, when you need it, need a towel.

So that's just two things you can do that are very inexpensive. For probably $50 you can get both of those two things. And if you like them, you take them with you. If you don't, then it helps you sell your house. So, all right, and to recap.

You know, my favorite topic is declutter, depersonalize and deep clean. And everybody's declutter and depersonalize and deep clean all different. But if you, if you really do your own version of depersonalize, declutter and deep clean, it's going to go a long way to moving your house up on the list of possibilities for the buying pub.

Don't sell yourself short. You bought your house for a reason. You bought it probably because you liked it. And if you think back, was probably staged and cleaned when you bought it that helped you want to buy it.

Anyway, that's the, think we hit all the topics, Clint. I'm let you take the next part. Tell them what they need to do.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (16:35)
All right. So, I'm to challenge everybody. Take your phone and walk around your house and snap pictures of each room or take a video. And then you look at it with a critical eye of a buyer. What's the first thing you notice that you could declutter or improve and start there? Make it neater, you know, and kind of get it listing ready.

that'll be kind of the, I guess, the first step in getting ready to sell the home.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (17:06)
Yeah. And don't get your feelings hurt if somebody tells you to pick up your clothes or declutter or depersonalize. All we want to do is help you sell your house. It's nothing personal. We just know that a clean, fresh house sells faster than one where you're stepping over dirty clothes to get to the bedrooms or the bathrooms so you can see the house. Make it easy on the buying public to look at your house so your house goes higher on the list of possibilities.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (17:35)
and you know it's something we didn't talk about? And it's sometimes a touchy subject. We missed something. Smell.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (17:37)
We missed something?

Okay.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (17:47)
And I'm

just gonna mention it quickly. If you're living in the house, you probably don't notice it, but other people do because you're probably nose-blind because you're used to it. But your house smells, whether it's a good smell or a bad smell, it smells. Have somebody that's not over to your house a lot come over and tell you if there's any bad smells in your house that you need to address. And then look at getting a

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (17:58)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm a

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (18:14)
Febreze or Glade type air freshener that will attach to the smells and neutralize those odors.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (18:21)
Yeah.

And if you, if, if you have animals that live in the house with you, your house has a smell, and you're not going to smell it. And that's a conversation we have a lot. And, you know, people say, well, I don't smell it. Well, you're the only one in the world that doesn't smell it. Cause when we bring people in from outside, they can absolutely smell it. so do the best you can to clean it, then get a, get an air freshener to,

to try to mask what you can't clean without a much deeper clean. So that's enough of that touchy subject, Clint.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (18:52)
Now,

yeah. All right. Y'all like, share, comment, subscribe. Tell all your mom and them and their friends and your friends and send everybody to rerealestatepodcast.com. You can watch videos, you can watch episodes, you can listen to episodes, you can ask questions, you can find our websites, you can do all the things there.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (19:18)
All right. At re real estate podcast.com.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (19:18)
Where at? Where we can do that at?

That's rerealestatepodcast.com.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (19:27)
That's RE Real Estate Podcast. We

need to say it again. RErealestatepodcast.com.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (19:34)
All right, I think we doubled up this episode. All right, thank you everybody and we'll see you on the next episode.

Ben Harang, REALTOR® (19:36)
Okay, all right. All right.

All right. Y'all have a good day. Thanks. See you Clint.