To Sell Apartments, Furnishing Is No Afterthought

05-Oct-2010

I like this.

By

CPA/entrepreneur







The Appraisal

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

It wasn’t just the swinging chair, strung from the ceiling, that was distracting. When apartment hunters stepped into the third-floor studio for sale at 650 Avenue of the Americas, they found a white leather circular bed with red pillows and a hanging L.E.D. lamp with colors shifting from green to blue. Some said it reminded them of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“They would laugh,” said one of the listing brokers for the building, John Gomes. This was the model apartment for a condominium conversion project, and it was not selling itself, much less helping to sell other apartments in the same building as it was intended to do. Mr. Gomes, of CORE Marketing Group, who took over listings in this Flatiron district building in April, stopped showing the model after roughly six viewings. “I quickly realized that it hurt more than it helped.”

Mr. Gomes knew it would take more than replacing towels to make buyers feel comfortable in a space where even Lady Gaga might crave beige walls and cream couches. With help from a decorator, he had the white wood floors stained a darker shade and installed furniture more commonly found in Manhattan apartments, like a rectangular bed. He strategically placed on the kitchen counter martini glasses, a bowl of lemons and a shaker primed for after-work cocktails and left around reading material like the Sotheby’s catalog.

“This is the way I would live, and a lot of people can identify with this,” said Mr. Gomes as he walked through the new model unit.

His efforts have paid off. Mr. Gomes said that he had sold 20 apartments in the 67-unit building and had three contracts signed last week for apartments similar to the $925,000 model.

He says that the changes mean “people can see it now.”

During the real estate boom, eager buyers bought apartments requiring enormous imagination to picture as homes: They bought unbuilt apartments or empty spaces with blank walls. When brokers put any furniture in model apartments, it was often abstract pieces like swinging chairs or orange couches.

Today, buyers are much less likely to take risks on apartments where they cannot figure out how to fit in their sofa bed or sideboard. So brokers have been redecorating old model units or filling unfurnished apartments.

“The difference between three years ago and now is that you could have actually shown an empty apartment without much staging,” said Shaun Osher, chief executive of CORE. His firm now stages apartments that “leave as little up to the imagination as possible.”

For some high-end listings, Mr. Osher orders brokers to fill cabinets with fine china, not just “dishes in there from Kmart.” He has even had brokers fill closets of for-sale apartments with clothing like “Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel, Paul Smith.”

“If you’re going to hang anything in the closet, it should be a name brand that the buyer can relate to,” Mr. Osher said. The clothing and accessories do not go to waste: they get moved to the next condo project.

Since 2007, brokers had been trying to sell a seventh-floor two-bedroom apartment at One Brooklyn Bridge Park. Rachel Poggi, the building’s director of sales, had it professionally decorated and reintroduced after Labor Day for $1.275 million. When she opened the door to the apartment, it smelled and looked like an inhabited home. The coat rack at the front entrance had a woman’s polka-dotted raincoat. A bedroom was fashioned into a girl’s room, painted pink, featuring a bed with a hastily tossed baby doll and a dresser lined with glittery sunglasses and a pink purse. Another model unit had a room made up for a boy. Ms. Poggi said that since she had the apartment staged, two buyers, including a couple wanting to start a family, made offers.

“It’s been pretty consistent that when we furnish an apartment that we get multiple offers within days,” Ms. Poggi said.

When the developers of 189 Schermerhorn put their apartments up for sale in 2009, they filled units with bright orange chairs and made it what Aaron Lemma, a Corcoran broker selling units there, called “dormlike.”

Late last year, the project was taken over by one of its investors, Jamestown Properties, and the developer handed back deposits on the sold units and started from scratch. When the apartments came back up for sale in May, the apartments were fully decorated in subdued designs. One 16th-floor two-bedroom apartment was decorated in pale shades of blues and browns and was decorated with clean-lined furniture like the Goodwin sofa from West Elm and a table set with flatware from Crate and Barrel. Another one-bedroom unit featured dark-wood built-in cabinets that buyers could buy at a discount for their unit to get a better sense of how they would create more storage space. Mr. Lemma said that 137 out of 246 units have gone to contract.

Some buyers are following the building’s decorating style. Liz Day is closing on Thursday on a one-bedroom apartment. She liked how the model apartment was staged so much that she thought about buying its couch, but she needed a sofa bed. She plans to paint her bedroom the same mocha color of the model. She credited the decorations with helping her to think “about paint colors early and where art would hang.”

“When they decorate them in a style that sort of feels like your style, you’re much more likely to make it feel like home,” she said.


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