Send Out Cards is a wonderful new concept and service that is changing peoples lives one card at a time.

When was the last time you sent a “Thinking of You” card to someone you care about, or a simple Thank you or expression of appreciation?

Here is a wonderful way to send an unexpected card at an unexpected time!  Never forget special occasions! You can use this to motivate, uplift, encourage and truly make a differance!

Create a  client database for your business and send out your annual cards quickly and easily with no hassle or stress.

You can send a printed greeting card with your  own message in Less than 60 Seconds.

• Choose your card
• Write your message
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SendOutCards prints it, stuffs it and mails it, (with a real stamp on it)  all for less than a greeting card at the store.

You can even upload a picture from your own computer and place it in the card… It is a fun, easy and stress free way to put back the personal in sending a greeting card!

Test Drive before you buy!  Send one card for FREE!

Call 1-866-703-0809 and ask for my assistant Cathy to help you get started today

home staging  (home stag’jing) n. 1. The process of preparing your property for sale by setting the scene throughout the house to create immediate buyer interest in your property.

When you get ready to place a home on the market it becomes a product.  Similar to the items on the shelves of your local store, each product has features and benefits, pluses and minuses, as well as competition.

To compete in the marketplace, a product must be priced correctly and packaged better than competing products. Houses are no different.

As one of many properties for sale, your house must be packaged and presented to prospective buyers to highlight all the benefits - space, traffic flow, curb appeal and overall ambience.

Before                After

Professionally Staged Properties:
• Look better than others on the market
• Sell faster
• Typically sell for more money
• Look better in print and internet ads
• Receive more foot traffic
• End up on a buyer’s “must see” list
• Are viewed by buyers as “well maintained”
• Are viewed as “well maintained” by Appraisers
• Are often appraised at a higher values
Are “move in ready”

A consultation is a powerful marketing tool which can be used as part of your listing package.

· Having access to a qualified, professional staging company on your team sets you apart from other agents who are not using staging consultations or stagers.

· Saves you the awkwardness of having to explain to your clients what needs to be done to prepare their home for sale. We are skilled at handling the emotions of our clients in a professional, calm, and rational way. We remind them we are preparing their house for the largest buying audience.

· Very cost effective and high yield on the return - for as little as a $125 one-hour verbal walk through and your homeowner will have the tools needed to prepare their house for sale.

· When your client receives a consult, it can become a “pride of ownership” issue. It is easy to follow the recommendations to get their home ready for sale. This allows the homeowner to be proactive - if they want to truly sell their home, they will improve the condition of the home. This is a key components to the sale of your listing.

· We create equity for our clients. The return on the investment of a staging consultation will ALWAYS pay for itself! Statistically, the better the condition and showing of the home brings a quicker sale and a higher sales price.

Realtors Know:

• How to get a listing
• The laws concerning selling & buying
• Contracts and extensive paper work
• Determining a fair listing price
• Extensive Marketing and Showings (and always smiling!)
• Closing the deal

Home Stagers Know How To:

• Create good traffic flow in rooms

• Neutralize a lived-in space

• Let the light in

• Create ambiance

• Use accessories to high light the space

• Prepare a property according to the market

• Use of popular neutral styles to appeal to the widest audience
• Apply the latest color trends

• Shop for owners, usually with discounts

• Maintain an inventory of accessories and furniture
• Create good curb appeal
• Accentuate all architectural details

When I was ready to take my business forward, I realized that I really did not know where to start or how to juggle all the ideas and plans that were swarming in my head.  I was going to need some help so that I still had a life outside of my business that I didn’t neglect my family, my friends or myself.

I need someone to help me to identify priorities and develop strategies that focused on developing my business and at the same time allowed me to reach my goals.

So I hired a “personal coach”.  I wasn’t exactly sure of the whole idea at first, but learned that a coach is someone that takes you step-by-step as you work on your business, personal life, management and leadership.

I signed up for 3 months with Coach Cathy of Coaching with Cathy.  The 3 months were most extraordinary!  It felt good to know that I had someone in my corner that you could bounce ideas off of, who was not judgmental or critical.  Someone who could get you back on track, even when things looked like they were overwhelming and uncertain.

I highly recommend hiring a “personal coach” to help you tap into your inner voice, and stay focused on your priorities.  In doing so you will be able to pursue your passion, whatever it may be.

Top 10 Reasons to Professionally Stage in Your Home:

“It was great fun coming home tonight to see our house. We felt like we were on one of those “Flip this House” TV shows without the camera recording our reactions. We think the house looks great! ”

As some first time buyers get priced out of the market and the housing market starts to slow a little, home owners may be reconsidering whether to sell or if already on the market may be thinking about reducing the price to encourage buyer interest.

Kym Tarr of ShoeString Interior ReDesigns says ‘If you prepare your property well before you put it on the market you will greatly improve the chances of achieving the asking price and your chances of selling quickly. If already on the market your home could benefit from a staging makeover which could turn the next viewing into a sale.’

ShoeString Home Staging offers a variety of services including consultations, detailed reports which suggest actions such as reducing or re-organizing some of the furniture & personal items. To on site staging where we utilize what you have or bring in our own inventory to accessorize rooms to create a more harmonious effect.

Home Staging before or after putting the house on the market?

Ideally a home should be professionally presented before being valued and marketed. This is common practice in the United States where Real Estate Agents have proved the increased value of property and speed of sales where properties are presented well. However in this country we are lagging behind a little, many home owners suffer from having to show around more viewers than necessary before they clinch the sale.

Buyers agree that when a house is not up to the standard they expect, they try to bargain price for the ‘work’ they perceive they will need to do. The solution is therefore to make the house as appealing as possible before the first buyer steps a foot over the threshold. Get the presentation right and the offers will follow.

• Peel a banana from the bottom and you won’t have to pick the little “stringy things” off of it. That’s how the primates do it. Take your bananas apart when you get home from the store. If you leave them connected at the stem, they ripen faster.

• Store your opened chunks of cheese in aluminum foil. It will stay fresh much longer and not mold!

• Peppers with 3 bumps on the bottom are sweeter and better for eating. Peppers with 4 bumps on the bottom are firmer and better for cooking.

• Add a teaspoon of water when frying ground beef. It will help pull the grease away from the meat while cooking.

• To really make scrambled eggs or omelets rich add a couple of spoonfuls of sour cream, cream cheese, or heavy cream in and then beat them up.

• Add garlic immediately to a recipe if you want a light taste of garlic and at the end of the recipe if your want a stronger taste of garlic.

• Leftover snickers bars from Halloween make a delicious dessert. Simple chop them up with the food chop per. Peel, core and slice a few apples. Place them in a baking dish and sprinkle the chopped candy bars over the apples. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes!!! Serve alone or with vanilla ice cream.

• Easy Deviled Eggs- Put cooked egg yolks in a zip lock bag. Seal, mash till they are all broken up. Add remainder of ingredients, reseal, keep mashing it up mixing thoroughly, cut the tip of the baggy, squeeze mixture into egg. Just throw bag away when done easy clean up.

• Expanding Frosting- When you buy a container of cake frosting from the store, whip it with your mixer for a few minutes. You can double it in size. You get to frost more cake/cupcakes with the same amount. You also eat less Sugar and calories per serving.

• Newspaper weeds away- Start putting in your plants, work the nutrients in your soil. Wet Newspapers put layers around the plants overlapping as you go cover with mulch and forget about weeds. Weeds will get through some gardening plastic they will not get through wet newspapers.

• Broken Glass- Use a wet cotton ball or Q-tip to pick up the small shards of glass you can’t see easily.

• No More Mosquitoes-Place a dryer sheet in your pocket. It will keep the mosquitoes away.

• Squirrel Away! To keep squirrels from eating yo ur plants sprinkle your plants with cayenne pepper. The cayenne pepper doesn’t hurt the plant and the squirrels won’t come near it.

• Flexible vacuum - To get something out of a heat register or under the fridge add an empty paper towel roll or empty gift wrap roll to your Vacuum. It can be bent or flattened to get in narrow openings.

• Reducing Static Cling- Pin a small safety pin to the seam of your slip and you will Not have a clingy skirt or dress. Same thing works with

• Slacks that cling when wearing panty hose. Place pin in seam of slacks and — ta da! –static is gone.

• Measuring Cups-Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill with hot water. Dump out the hot water, but don’t dry cup. Next, add your ingredient, such as peanut butter, and watch how easily It comes right out.

• Foggy Windshield? Hate foggy windshields? Buy a chalkboard eraser ($ store) and keep it in the glove box of your car. When the windows fog, rub with the eraser! Works better than a cloth!

• Reopening envelope- If you seal an envelope and then realize you forgot to include something inside , just place your sealed envelope in the freezer for an hour or two. Viola! It unseals easily.

• Conditioner- Use your hair conditioner to shave your legs. It’s a lot cheaper than shaving cream and leaves your legs really smooth. It’s also a great way to use up the conditioner you bought but didn’t like when you tried it in your hair…

• Goodbye Fruit Flies- To get rid of pesky fruit flies, take a small glass fill it 1/2″ with Apple Cider Vinegar and 2 drops of dish washing liquid, mix well. You will find those flies drawn to the cup and gone forever!

• Get Rid of Ants- Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it, take it “home,” can’t digest it so it kills them. It may take a week or so,especially if it rains, but it works & you don’t have the worry about pets or small children being harmed!

Unless a home has been designed by the homeowners, most have dilemmas about the functionality of rooms. In most homes, I find there are rooms that go unused for most of the year.

Why not turn the dining room into a library by adding bookcases. Rows of books make an impressive backdrop and encourage interesting dinner conversation. As excellent space savers, not only do bookshelves provide premium storage space for books, but they also offer a handsome setting for china, crystal and other curios.

Or you could change the conventional dining room into a cozy retreat where the husband could have his friends over for some quality guy time. I recommended a pub table and stools, a couple of comfortable leather chairs, a dart board and a small TV.

Create different use areas in a room, so that more than one activity can take place at a time. This gives you more opportunities to be together as a family, and just requires some rearranging and creativity, not bucks!

Perhaps you can set up a small table and two chairs in an unused corner for a game table, sneak an unused easy chair into the room for someone to read, pick up a couple of bar stools at a yard sale to add to the kitchen counter. Store placemats in drawers to turn the coffee table into a quick dining area, and make sure there are a couple of floor pillows for impromptu movie night….

ShoeString Interior ReDesigns is a proud member of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, a free online community to help real estate professionals grow their business.