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Erik Blitvich, meet tough love, real estate style: If you're trying to move a property in a slow market, you're not only going to have to clean it, you also might have to stage it, too.
Staging is the practice of dressing up, or sometimes dressing down, a home to make it more appealing to buyers. As a business, it's a relatively young field that's gaining a foothold in the Chicago area as anxious sellers look for a way to attract that increasingly scarce commodity: a sales contract.
"When there's a ton of houses on the market, you have to set yourself apart and help the buyer's imagination kick in," said North Side real estate agent Beth Wexner, who routinely uses stagers to help make her listings look more like builders' models than places where people live.
Would you be willing to spend more money for a house that's more comfortable, healthy, energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than the average home? The Home Builders Association of Bucks and Montgomery Counties hopes so. The HBA on Tuesday launched a new program that gives home builders a road map to getting their homes certified as green. The HBA's Keystone Green Building Initiative, modeled on existing programs from around the country, establishes a point system builders can follow to get houses classified as one of three achievement levels: bronze, silver or gold. The idea, said Carl Seville, a Decatur, Ga., green building consultant who helped the local construction group launch its program, is to sell home builders, and home buyers, on the benefits of environmentally friendly building practices.
The Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) has expressed confidence that the massive infrastructure development project underway at the Johannesburg International Airport (JIA) will be completed by 2009. The airport's General Manager Chris Hlekane said all this would be done to ensure that there was no construction activity during the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup. .
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