Customer Reviews

301 Simple Things You Can Do to Sell Your Home Now and For More Money Than You Thought: How to Inexpensively Reorganize, Stage, and Prepare Your Home for Sale

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This book is extremely useful when you're selling your house. I thought I already knew how to make my house look good, but I hadn't realized half of the things mentioned in this book. It details everything you will need to know, including how to complete minor repairs in your home from replacing a faucet to painting your walls. It also talks about furniture arrangement and getting rid of the clutter. I never realized that something as simple as turning your dining room table at a different angle could make that big of a difference. After seeing the pictures, I believe! This book is filled with before and after pictures (in color) that show what a difference staging the room can have. Clark's book also provides check-lists and tips throughout so that you won't forget anything. The tips she provides are practical and easily implemented. She also includes a section on how to get the most for your money, especially when you are on an extremely tight budget. If you are trying to sell your house, this is THE book to buy. It contains all of the information you will need to get more money for your house.

We've all heard that staging your home is the key to selling it at a higher price point, but until reading this book, I had no idea how to do it properly, or how much impact the smallest touches would have on my final sale price.

While no homebuyer would ever need to implement all 301 staging techniques in their home, the organized layout of this book makes it simple for any reader to find just the right strategies for their home. There is truly a solution for every budget, property size and location and home renovation skill level. This book was an invaluable tool in helping me to decide which changes I needed to make, how much they could increase the value of my home, how to go about making the changes and even when to hire a contractor. I thought I at least knew the basics, but 301 Simple Things surprised me - I dropped some of my original plans (they just didn't seem worth it anymore) and adopted several new techniques that even my real estate agent found impressive.

With a comprehensive guide like this available, it just doesn't make sense to go it alone. This book left me with a feeling of accomplishment, as I handled many of the value-building tasks on my own with Clark's instruction.

Selling a home can be a time-consuming and stressful time, especially if the home doesn't sell right away, or doesn't even get serious bites from potential buyers. There are a lot of reasons buyers might not be interested in a house - the location, for example - that are out of the seller's control. However, there are also a lot of things sellers can do to actually sell their house to the buyer, primarily by making the house a more attractive and compelling purchase. Teri B. Clark's book on house staging, the not-so-succinctly titled 301 Simple Things You Can Do to Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought, lays out how to effectively stage your house to maximize both the number of interested buyers, and the selling price.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, staging is essentially arranging and decorating your house in a way that makes it appealing to virtually anyone who enters it. Think of a window display in a store, or a floor model of a bedroom set, and you will get the idea: the objective is to make the house an eye-catching product that buyers are excited about purchasing. 301 Simple Things...covers the entire process of staging in great detail, from simple do-it-yourself tasks like cutting down on clutter, patching drywall, and thoroughly - and I mean thoroughly - cleaning your kitchen, bathroom, and windows, to more complex tasks that could require professional help, like putting in a new toilet. The overall point that the book drives home is that staging is not the same as remodeling, and should not require installation of expensive appliances or amenities, or major changes to the house itself. Staging is about doing a variety of small, things: painting cabinets, rearranging furniture, cleaning, opening curtains, etc. to make the house more presentable to buyers.

Though the book at times serves as an advertisement for some of the professional house stagers it features in its case studies, the content is actually based around a do-it-yourself type of attitude. It walks you through all the tasks and principles behind staging your house, and gives specific, step-by-step instructions on all the tasks it recommends. If you have never put up wallpaper or painted a concrete basement floor, for example, Clark walks you through all of the details of those processes. A simple carpentry book might be a good companion piece if you decide to stage your house yourself, but the information in 301 Simple Things... is detailed enough that you will probably only have to consult the carpentry book if you run into a problem. Speaking of problems: aside from guiding you through what to do, 301 Simple Things... also covers what not to do, describing problems and pitfalls that turn off potential buyers.

The great thing about 301 Simple Things You Can Do to Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought is that the vast majority of the book is useable content, without a lot of fluff. Case studies, which are essentially anecdotes from real estate professionals, serve to reinforce the importance of whatever topic the book is covering, and its illustrations (photographs) do a great job of showing, visually, how staging can change the look and feel of a house. If you are considering selling your home, 301 Simple Things...is a great read. It provides plenty of useable ideas for making your house a product that potential buyers will get excited about purchasing, and living in. Whether you decide to use the services of a professional, or make improvements yourself using its step-by-step guides, 301 Simple Things...can be a huge asset in your quest to sell your home.

If you're really ready to sell your home or property, Teri Clark's book is an eye opener. Clark shows potential sellers how anyone can manage to get more money out of their property in simple no nonsense terms. She builds on everything she says with anecdotal evidence from successful real estate agents to house appraisers. I know that when I bought my home I was able to leverage for a lower price, just because the seller was not willing to fix some light fixtures and paint. Clark shows you how you can make thousands on your home with "staging" techniques which really get buyer's motivated. Sometimes, Clark is repetitive when she discusses wallpaper and shades of paint, but she does get the point across. If you want to sell your old car, you would clean it up, just that simple. But, if you really want to get more profit, you can go the extra mile and fix that dent. Clark plays on this theme and shows how many people just drop their homes off to the real estate agent in an "as-is" condition, creating a nervousness for potential buyer's - "why did they want to get rid of this place so fast," or "if the floor creeks, what else is wrong!" Clark offers before and after photos for house staging so that anyone can see why the house sold for more. The house flipping shows you see on television are simply too much and too risky... you might want to stick to Clark's ideas if you're just out to sell your home... the book is a bargain when you see how much more you can get for your home with so little.

I love this book! Teri Clark has created a gem that is full of fantastic ideas to help you easily transform your house from a home into a product that others will want to buy. If you are selling your house, you need this book. No matter what your budget, you will find suggestions that will bring you thousands of dollars in profits and help your home sell faster.

As a home buyer, I have always felt much more inclined to try to get a bargain when making an offer for a house that wasn't loved than when walking through a house that was presentation ready. Don't sell your cherished home to bargain hunters when you can sell to home buyers who want to move up in the world to something better than they had before! "301 Simple Things" helps you create a living space that exceeds their expectations and ensures that you close the sale at a price that's right for you.

"301 Simple Things" is also great for people who simply want to live well. With a few simple tasks, you can create a beautiful environment that is a both a haven and a place to entertain and enjoy. Don't settle for good, read the book and see how easily you can make your house a great place to live.

In 301 Simple Things, Teri B. Clark gets back to the basics of preparing a home for sale. The book is filled with detailed information about staging and updating a home, right down to how-to guides for painting and repairs. Interspersed with success stories and real-life situations, Ms. Clark clearly illustrates the need for depersonalizing, decluttering, and rearranging a home's interior (and exterior) before placing it on the market. You only get one chance to make a first impression. Following the instructions in this book will make that first impression a lasting and appealing one for potential home buyers, thus generating a quicker sale for a larger profit. I am so happy I read this book prior to putting our home on the market. Now I know what I need to do in order to sell my home quickly and for more money.

Teri B. Clark shares her expert tips on how to make your house look like a model home to showcase its potential to prospective buyers. Each page is filled with tricks of the trade and advice from professionals, and each chapter is summarized with a numbered tip list for easy reference. The book also includes before and after photos, as well as true stories of houses that sold for more than the asking price.

I recommend this book to everyone, regardless of whether they have a house to sell. Who doesn't want their house to look like a model home? Or, at the very least, sparkling clean, less cluttered, and more stylish? Teri B. Clark has written a do-it-yourself, fix-it-up, reorganization, cleaning, and decorating manual all rolled into one! The best part about her cleaning tips is that all of her methods entail using natural products such as orange oil and baking soda--very Earth and wallet friendly. There is an entire chapter on how to stage your home on a shoestring budget, which is ideal, especially in the current marketplace. She has ingenious ideas, and she demonstrates with data that a small investment can bring a large return. This is a tremendously useful book for all homeowners.

Dozens of color photos of 'before' and 'after' examples illustrate staging step-by-step, offering homeowners and their agents key tips to understanding how a property presents itself and what enhances its salability. From do-it-yourself enhancement projects to inexpensive solutions for potentially expensive problems, 301 SIMPLE THINGS is the guide homeowners should consult first before even listing a property - and any public library lending collection will find it an excellent reference.

Even if you are not planning on selling your house any time soon, this would be a good book to have around. In fact, by the time you get through following all of the advice here, you might not even want to sell, but if still do, there is a very good chance that you will indeed see the benefits of getting up to10 percent more from the sale.

This book looks at everything from the inside out, and from top to bottom. It is probably not the type of book you would just sit down and read from cover to cover, though you could because its style is easy to read as well as informative. Some of the best features include "This Could Be You" success stories interspersed throughout the book. These achieve their goal to inspire the reader. While these are balanced with the rest of the text, at times some of the other inserted text boxes almost become annoying. For example, the Professional Bonus Tips are helpful, but sometimes they seem to be overused. This is especially evident in the chapter, "Putting It All Back together," where it seems that most of the chapter is made up of text boxes instead of text.


Aside from this formatting issue, the tips are valuable and range from advice about how to pay attention to the smallest details such as wiping clean light switch covers to more significant aspects of staging, such as depersonalization in order to appeal to the largest number of perspective home buyers.

Before and after photographs are used to illustrate some of the main points. These include color insets and some smaller black and whites throughout. Sometimes the quality of these are not all that great--in a few cases the before and after photos are not take from exactly the same perspective in the room. Still, most of the photos do help to get the point across, so they are generally are useful.

All in all, this book is inspiring. It makes me want to get off the couch and transform my own home even though I had no plans of selling. I suspect it can have the same the effects on you as well.

There are definitely some good tips here, some of which are common sense but some information that inexperienced home sellers (like myself) can definitely benefit from. But I was distracted from the good advice by the extraordinarily low quality of this book. There are typos and grammatical errors EVERYWHERE! The editing was nonexistent, or done so shoddily that it was a distraction to the content of the book. And the "full-color photo insert" is laughable - amateur photos taken by homeowners themselves, or possibly by their realtors, showing before & after photos which may have been helpful, if they weren't of such poor quality and so small that it's difficult to see anything. If you're looking for examples of colors, decoration, layouts, etc., these photos are not helpful in the least.

But the overall information is useful, even though the quality of this book is very poor, the chapters are organized somewhat haphazardly, and much of the information (e.g. step-by-step instructions on how to remove wallpaper, or fix a toilet, or a hundred other home improvement projects) is best found elsewhere in more detail.

Worth checking out of a library? Yes. Worth buying yourself? No.