The Prep Step: Help Getting Ready To Sell

Leeesburg Today
May 5, 2005

Margaret Morton
Staff Writer

When Susan Macnamara-Gonzalez and her husband Jose were returning home one day after a rather dispiriting look at a house for sale in Middleburg, they found themselves thinking "if those people had spent a couple of thousand dollars in sprucing up their house they'd have a bidding war." That thought led to another- with the net result the couple started their own company, WePrepHomesToSell.com., at the beginning of the year.

Susan Gonzalez worked in commercial space planning for 12 years before she quit to be home with her children. But she was already getting antsy to get involved in something. She had idly thought that she needed someone to put their house in order to sell it quickly while they looked for another home, not wanting to carry two mortgages. The state of the home in Middleburg clinched it. The house had dirty vents, sediment cracks, one half the house was painted builder white. It looked abandoned and had no warmth, even though it was a beautiful house on a lovely lot, Susan recalled.

"We didn't even put in an offer," she said.

A Realtor friend told them their idea was ridiculous. "Everything sells in Loudoun," they were told. However, the more they thought about the idea, the more they liked it. Susan said that she has seen houses that just didn't make sense aesthetically. "You couldn't figure out how to live in them," she said. The couple started their business at the first of the year. Bringing a fresh eye to a home and looking at it without the encumbrances of affection and loved possessions gives her team a clear vision of how to best present the home to strangers.

The idea caught on. Almost six months later, the Gonzalez' have prepped four entire houses and four houses "a little bit." She got her first order in the simplest way possible. She had a large sign advertizing her company fixed to the back of her Suburban and she got a call from the woman who was stuck behind her in traffic.

The service company has a strong online presence, with a Web site that shows sellers-and purchasers-what a house looked like before and after her team has been through it.

She recalled a house that was referred to her that had been on the market for a long time. There had been a lot of traffic through it, but no offers. She and her team went in, restaged the rooms, cleaned and painted. Within 13 days after an article was written about her efforts, there were four offers and a bidding war. Although restaging the furniture can be part of what she does, she said the final result involves far more than that. Some people think they can achieve the same results by spending two hours restaging furniture; that's not so, she insists.

"My business is not staging. We come in and go through everything. We haul out all the trash and furniture-to the dump, the Salvation Army or storage. We paint bedrooms that need attention or down the side of the stairs where kids put their fingerprints. We wash appliances, vacuum all the vents," she said. The Gonzalez team even scrubs under the sink and searches out moldy corners. Her approach is stringent. Clients are urged to remove all family photographs from view, ditto for liquor, religious items and crazy art. Although some might fuss with her, most of her clients don't, she said. "People want to sell and sell fast for the most money."

She has a crew of up to 12 people from 10 different trades who work to turn each house around within a week. The jobs are varied, some big, some small. She's very thorough. One project included the commercial steam cleaning of a basement carpet which had been stained by animals, replacement of a light fixture, washing all the windows, replacement caulking and replacement of a toilet paper holder, replacement cabinet doors and knobs, removal of a fluorescent light fixture in the kitchen, cleaning a chandelier, scrubbing down the baseboards and painting the trim, touching up the walls where needed and replacing all the burned out light bulbs in the house. It's a new, but growing market segment in the real estate industry, and she said it is difficult to assess how much the team's efforts have helped clients in selling their homes. Industry estimates show the effort can add 5 to 15 percent to the sales price. A recent article in a business magazine estimated that houses that have received prepping usually go at the asking price and in half the time. The face-lift doesn't come cheap. "It's expensive," Susan readily admits. Her prices range from $200 for a couple of hours to $7,500 or more, depending on the extent of work needed. "We're Band-Aiders. We can do one room or the whole house." Most of her other jobs have come from newspaper advertising. Others are beginning to come through real estate referrals. Susan said she thought she might have to start addressing that market. "They're now calling me to find out what I do," she said.