Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Sun posts loss but revenue up Company says acquisitions helped boost…
- Bringing Expertise from Canada into the United States.
- ‘Staging’ results in faster sale, richer price

Sun posts loss but revenue up Company says acquisitions helped boost…
San Francisco Chronicle – Oct 27, 2006
Sun shares rose 6 cents to $5. 36 in regular trading Thursday and another penny in after-hours trading. The company said it got a boost from its recent acquisitions, particularly StorageTek, the data-storage company it bought last year. Some analysts had been skeptical about Sun’s acquisition, but Schwartz said the move has made the company more competitive in the data-storage market. Sun said its Solaris 10 operating system has also become more widely accepted. In a statement, Schwartz said, “It’s great to grow faster than the competition, maintain strong gross margins and see continued adoption of Solaris on HP, Dell and IBM computers. ” Analyst Crawford Del Prete of International Data Corp.

Bringing Expertise from Canada into the United States.
Free with registration – Mortgage Line – AccessMyLibrary.com – Oct 27, 2006
NEW YORK — RBC Capital Markets has extended its commercial mortgage-backed securities platform beyond Canada with the launch of its real estate mortgage capital business in the United States. The company has named Dan Smith, who previously ran GE Real Estate’s North American fixed- and floating-rate real estate financing programs, to head the new group out of Dallas. real estate corporate banking responsible for U.

‘Staging’ results in faster sale, richer price
USA Today – Oct 27, 2006
3% more than their asking price, on average, while sellers with non-staged homes sold for 1. 6% more than the asking price. The cost of hiring a company to stage your home tends to range from $1,800 to $3,800 but can go much higher, depending on the size of the house and the amount of work involved. Freedman says Tailored Transitions, the company she used, “had a hard time convincing me and my husband to spend the money. People don’t spend money on this kind of thing. I’d never heard of staging. ”
In the end, they spent $2,500 for the interior, $4,000 for the exterior, $500 to rent “props” like less eye-catching artwork and decorative pillows and $500 to move their excess furniture and boxes into storage… They listed their home this month for $949,000, and Freedman says, “I don’t know if we would have priced it that high when it wasn’t so attractive. ”
Judee von Seldeneck put her staged home in Philadelphia on the market this month; it sold in one day, for $700,000. From moving shrubs to planting flowers, to replacing the knobs on kitchen cabinets and ripping up the carpet on the stairs, every change was made to accentuate the house’s best features. There were even pumpkins on the porch to lend a homey, inviting look. Inside, the stagers “put furniture that looked comfortable but not too heavy, not cluttered,” says von Seldeneck, CEO of an executive search firm, who’s “in my 60s. ” The books on shelves, colors of the rug, the furniture — all were “geared more toward younger people. ”
She spent $8,000 on the job and says, “It was the best money I ever spent.