Page 56 - Lighting Magazine October 2018

PREPARING HOMES TO SELL
Jana Uselton of Model My Home shared her staging tips with interior designers at the Las Vegas Market. These techniques could also be bene cial to showroom personnel helping customers renovate or ready their homes for the market.
Jana Uselton of Model My Home
on personalizing a space for your client, while stag- ing requires you depersonalize that space.”
There is more to this design niche than having a ready selection of chairs and sofas to furnish empty rooms. “There is a strategy to everything we do,” she noted. “Our focus is to sell the home. The items we put in the room can’t be soaking up all the energy and a ention when potential buyers walk through. We want people to notice the space; what we put in it should ‘disappear.’
“In interior design, everything is centered on the client’s needs and preferences,” she said. “Staging is about merchandising a property. When we talk to clients, the conversation is about the results. We explain that our ‘product’ will help them sell their home faster, without leaving money on the table. It’s about reducing stress for people.”
Uselton originally acquired her inventory of
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52 enLIGHTenment Magazine | october 2018
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Jana Uselton and her husband, Tim, have what you do as interior designers — you are focused
had great success rehabbing and building investment properties in the Dallas area, most recently completing 13 houses for HGTV’s hit show Flip or Flop.
Over time, she noticed that when she applied certain visual techniques, the homes would sell for more than the asking price. That’s when she realized the e ectiveness of staging key rooms in all of their real estate properties. Uselton adapted the skills she learned to form her own staging business Model My Home; several years later, she established the Home Staging and ReDesign Association (HSRA) so she could share those techniques with others.
The company name “Model My Home” taps into a common consumer desire that Uselton observed o en when handling real estate. “Everyone wants to have a ‘model home look’ or redesign their place to have that [aesthetic],” she said.
“Staging is strategic design for positioning homes for sale,” Uselton stated. “It’s almost the opposite of