The Jill Vegas Project

[transcript]

[Jill Vegas, Real Estate Stager]

The real estate market in New York is freakin' nuts. I'm Jill Vegas and I stage apartments in New York City. I have real estate agents across the country asking me to help them redo apartments, new developments, homes, anything that won't sell, they ask me to come in.

[Jay DeDapper]

Hi my name is Jay and this is my loft in Greenwich Village. I've lived here for about 13 years and it's time to sell so I've talked to some brokers and one of the brokers suggested I ought to get someone in here to help me make it look really good for sale and he suggested I talk to a stager named Jill Vegas. I don't really know what a stager is, but, Jill Vegas, the name sounds good.

[Jill Vegas]

My feeling is when someone walks in the front door you need to make an amazing first impression in thirty seconds. If you make a bad first impression it won't sell. Simple as that.

Hi I'm Jill Vegas.

Hi I'm Jay come on in.

Nice to meet you.

Good to meet you too.

Okay, can we turn some lights on, I feel like I walked into a cave.

That better?

Much better. Okay I want to start this whole tour the way buyers are going to see the apartment. Okay you have thirty seconds to make a first impression and this impression is not good. We need something more inviting that appeals to everyone – a mirror – let people see themselves when they come in.

People like to see themselves when they come in?

Don't we all?

Okay.

With each apartment it's all about creating a lifestyle brand – who's going to be buying this apartment. We need to make sure everything appeals to that potential buyer.

The purple wall has gotta go.

Why?

It's gotta go because it's too specific. You have to take away any reason somebody might say no. If the potential buyer loves the apartment and they can't get over the purple wall, they're not going to buy it.

Even if they can repaint the wall?

It doesn't matter.
It's not personal, you've got to get rid of your personal artifacts. So these wonky yellow pillows have got to go.

They needed to go a long time ago!

It happens and then all of a sudden 10 years go by and you have all this stuff you've gotta get rid of it.

Not so it's sterile and has no soul, but so that it has an aspirational lifestyle, feeling when they walk in.

So we need to create a focal point and right now there's no focal point and what's going to sell this apartment is, oh look I can move in here and we want to get them to the windows and right now it's so distracting I don't know where to look.

These plants are so sickly looking – they just have to go. What this says it, hi my apartment has no light and I die.

And, oh my god, look at this view! I had no idea you have this view.

Yeah midtown, Empire State Building.

This is incredible. When you walk in it feels like a cave – before you turned the lights on – and then there's all this clutter so I was not inspired to walk quickly to discover what other surprises there were. But now that I see this – this is where we have to get people right away.

Dealing with very demanding clients when there's millions of millions of dollars on the table it's like you cannot screw it up. You just can't.

That TV from 1984 has got to go. These have to go. We want them to feel like they're trading up. There's a funny smell in the hallway. You have a nice refrigerator. You're furniture is so depressed.

I had someone call to do this huge estate outside of Paris and that's a completely different market from a loft in New York City.

We're creating a lifestyle. So when people walk in the front door we want them to feel this is my next home like they are the people in this apartment. We want them to feel like it's theirs and all they need to bring is a suitcase and a toothbrush.

You can choose not to do this these are all suggestions but if you want to get the most money you've got to do these things.

I typically have 5 to 15 projects going on at a time. I just had a baby, I'm a new mom so right now it's all project Max it's so much fun. And I just had my book come out and so I've been doing that. But it's like I'm this girl from Minnesota walking around in heels all day I mean it's crazy, that alone is a feat, on cobblestones in Tribeca.

I'm Al Gore and I invented the internet. I don't think I can say that!

Hi, I'm Jill Vegas and I invented the internet.