CINCINNATI — Listing a home is a big task, and getting it ready to list for top dollar can be stressful. That’s why two Cincinnatians decided to create a company to make it easier. And now, their business is booming and expanding across Ohio thanks to the hot real estate market

What You Need To Know

  • HomeStretch was created to help sellers get their homes ready to list

  • The company does everything from painting to flooring to cleaning and more

  • Derek Shewmon and Nick Lobert said while they were nervous about their company during the pandemic, the real estate boom brought a lot of business shortly after the shutdown

  • Because of their success in Cincinnati, the two decided to expand the business to Columbus this summer

​​​It takes a team to transform a home to be ready to sell, because there’s a lot to be done, which is why Nick Lobert and Derek Shewmon created HomeStretch — a business that helps transform spaces like these to appeal to home buyers. 

“This room will have a dramatic transformation from the way it looks today to the way it’ll look in a couple weeks when we’re finished with the painting project," Lobert said.

Lobert said  after doing 500 projects in a year and a half, they’ve started to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

“We can find a formula that works," he said. "And we know the colors that the buyers are most attracted to.”

In their current project, that means painting the walls a light neutral color and the woodwork white. He said small changes, like changing fixtures, can make a big difference to buyers.

“Walls and floor are 90% of what you’re looking at in a property," Lobert said. "So when you change the look of the walls and the floor it does dramatically change the property and it dramatically increases the property value as well.”

Lobert and Shewmon said that while they were worried about their business last March, those worries dwindled quickly as the real estate market blew up. 

“Once we got through that first wave a lot of stuff started to open, more people started putting their houses on the market," Shewmon said. "The real estate market started to heat up and we haven’t looked back since.”

While the two Cincinnati natives started the business in southwest Ohio, thanks to the post-pandemic boom, have been able to expand to Columbus.

“We started in Cincinnati just because we thought it was a value-added service and we really believe this helped people out," Shewmon said. "Once we really saw that this could be something bigger, we started looking elsewhere to see if we could expand the concept into other markets.”