 These
days, most people have an idea of what home staging is.
Some of us have even snuck a peak (albeit oftentimes to
hopefully steal a few designing ideas) at a neighbor’s
house while it was being staged for sale. But for
Shannon Clark, even before she started Carolina
Professional Staging a year ago, staging had been her
life.
Her designer’s eye was being developed long before she
became a small business owner. Childhood was filled with
weekends at garage sales and swap meets. She and her
mother, a professional interior designer, would first
scourge yard sales for fun looking for furniture and
accessories. “My mother would give me a dime for every
yard sale sign I could spot,” she recalls. They would
then take their finds, spruce them up, and then sell any
that her mother wasn’t going to use at a swap meet the
following week. There were times, Shannon explains, when
this was her family’s main form of income. The eighties,
much like the past few years, were a difficult time for
individuals in the housing market. Aside from her
mother’s interior design business, her stepfather, a
builder, was also affected by the fickleness of the
market, and sometimes months would pass between large
jobs.
While other girls were busy playing with dollhouses,
Shannon was helping her family to “flip” real houses,
and enjoying every minute of it. Whenever her parents
were able to tuck away enough money they would purchase
homes that they would, in turn, flip. It wasn’t long
before she took an active role in this as well. She grew
to become quite comfortable with a paintbrush, power
drill, and any other tools of the trade. Before she had
begun high school she had experienced, first hand, the
hard work that went into making a house ready to be
someone’s home.
Shannon moved away from home to attend college at
Georgetown University where she earned both a Bachelor’s
and later, double Master’s Degrees. To pay her way
through school, she continued finding and selling home
accessories in the Washington DC area. Additionally, she
took an internship at the White House. While in the
nation’s capitol, Shannon became something of a history
lover. “I hated history class in high school,” she
admits, but it was hard not to come to love it when she
spent over five years surrounded by it. Even though she
enjoyed living there, she knew she would always be a
Carolina gal, so when she graduated, she made a beeline
right for the Triad. With over two centuries of roots in
NC, there really wasn’t any other place that she wanted
to call home.
 For
the next ten years Shannon worked at Verizon as a
Director in Strategic Business Sales. Even though her
job title didn’t read designer or stager, she still
continued to do both on the side. It didn’t take long
for people to see that she had a knack for it, and once
they saw it, they were eager to tap into it. However,
her greatest challenge came in the form of a
“fixer-upper” she purchased shortly after returning to
the area. Of course, unbeknownst to her was just how
much fixing her new home was going to need.
A few hours after closing on the purchase, with the ink
barely dry, Shannon found herself standing in her
bathroom trying not to worry about the rather loud
creaking sound beneath her feet. But when the floor
snapped and one leg broke through to dangle from the
ceiling of the garage, it become apparent that the house
was going to require a lot more than just a fresh coat
of paint. Drawing on her experiences from flipping
houses, and just good old-fashioned hard work, she went
about transforming her fixer-upper from barely livable
to is-this-really-the-same-house? She began by gutting
the entire place, and when a job became too big for her
to handle alone, she found help, thus forging
relationships with people in the industry. After the
initial overhaul, her next big steps were to design a
built in shelving unit, to brick the fireplace in her
living room and to build a custom kitchen. All those
years of experience gave her the ability to visualize
things to the degree where she only needed to do a rough
sketch (coincidently on a napkin) before she could start
making the vision a reality.
Perhaps it was watching her own house become a home, or
perhaps it was simply that she couldn’t turn her back on
decades of experience in design and home improvement.
Or, perhaps it was that she had grown tired of hearing
the seemingly endless doom filled rant issuing forth
from newscasters, real estate analysts, and housing
market experts. Perhaps it just didn’t make sense to her
that someone else should be able to dictate how much her
single greatest investment was worth. Whatever it was it
gave her the idea that she was going to change the real
estate market here in the Triad, and she was going to
start by doing it one house at a time.
That was almost a year ago, and now Shannon is owner of
Carolina Professional Staging. She and a team of eight
other individuals have dedicated themselves to helping
people get top dollar for their homes by offering an
array of services related to increasing a home’s value.
Shannon explains, “I’m going to make whatever you (the
homeowner) have look its best.” Her goal is to emphasize
a house’s strengths by taking away the things that might
mask them, or by adding things that will highlight them.
To clients, she provides interior, exterior, and
landscape design services in an active role or as a
consultant. Her policy is to be honest to clients about
what needs to stay and what needs to go (sometimes
personal tastes get in the way of what appeals to a
greater population.) She has staged homes that range in
value from $100,000 to one that recently sold for its
asking price of $1.3 million. She has even staged homes
where, after seeing her work, the homeowners decided to
stay.
For her, staging homes is more than just helping the
homeowner; it’s also about helping the community. Each
time a home sells for its asking price (or higher) that
sale has helped to bring in more money for the area;
it has increased the value of other homes in the
neighborhood, and it demonstrates that the people here
want to take control back of their investment future.
One way to do that is to do what you can to make sure
that you’re getting what you invested, or more, into
your home. “People ask me all the time, ‘how can I
afford to stage my house?’ and I tell them, ‘how can you
afford not to?’” |
