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Home Staging
Getting ready to sell your home?
Your best bet might be to talk to the
ith house prices falling, homes “home-staging” experts first
By Ellen Diamond & Kathleen Smithnosky
With house prices falling, homes
are lingering on the market,
and both realtors and home
owners are searching for solutions
to help them sell.
Even in the best of markets, it often takes
more than just putting up a “for sale” sign and
pulling out the vacuum cleaner to sell a home.
Sometimes, even the most gorgeous home can
sit, waiting to be sold. Perhaps the problem is
not even the house itself, but the impression it
makes –or fails to make. It could simply be that
the current owner’s taste turns people off, or, if
the house is vacant, that the buyers may not be
able to visualize where their own belongings
would fit.
Today, many prospective home sellers are
trying to beat these statistics, as well as the dayson-
market averages, by calling in a professional
home stager. According to a HomeGain survey
of more than 2000 real estate agents nationwide,
professional home staging yields a 343 percent
average return on a typical $500 investment.
By now, you may be wondering exactly what
home staging is. According to Elizabeth
Weintraub in her Guide to Home Buying and
Selling, “Home staging is about illusions. It is
how David Copperfield would sell a house. It is
beyond decorating and cleaning. It is about
perfecting the art of creating moods.”
At Home Staging Resources, Ms. Slinkey
stresses, it is the “art of strategically preparing a
home going on the market so it shows off its
best features in a positive manner.” Making the
house look as good as possible to as many
potential home buyers as possible increases its
chances of selling more quickly at the highest
expected market value price for its area.
Desirability Factor
Stagers can dramatically change the appearance
of a home to make it look more desirable. While
encouraging the homeowner to look objectively
at their home as a product, professional stagers
work to broaden the appeal of the home using
their decorating skills to draw the eye to the
home’s positive features. The main focus of
staging is always to downplay the negative and
accentuate the positive in creative and costeffective
ways.
The home staging concept was launched in
California 30 years ago by Barb Schwartz, the
author of Home Staging: The Winning Way to
Sell Your House for More Money. Of course,
Pittsburgh is not California, where many sellers
wouldn’t dream of putting their home on the
market without having it professionally staged.
The idea is just catching on here. Although still
in its infancy stage, home staging interest is
being generated through HGTV shows such as
“Designed to Sell” and “Curb Appeal.”
Always keeping in mind that the way you
live in your home and the way you sell it are two
different things, professional stagers strive to
provide a look that is tasteful and neutral. Using
the homeowner’s own furniture as much as
possible, editing treasured collections (especially
personal ones such as family photographs),
recommending packing ahead of time to
eliminate clutter, and bringing in more updated
and neutral accessories, are among the jobs of
the professional stager. Each room should tell
its own story. That requires a ruthless objectivity
that the homeowner doesn’t have and that the
realtor often can’t mention because of the
relationship he or she has built up with the
homeowner. Whereas homeowners may not
able to be objective about their own home, and
buyers may not be able to
get
past another’s
décor and clutter, home stagers can do this quite
readily.
Costs for hiring a professional home stager
can range, depending on the area. They may be
as low as $100 for a consultation and proposal
in which the stager meets with the client to
discuss goals, expectations, and how to receive
the maximum return on investment for their
home improvement dollar. In this type of
consultation, the client will either be taking
notes or receive a list of recommendations that
they can tackle themselves. On the other hand,
they may range from $600 to $1200 for a workstyle
package in which the stager spends one or
more days completing the transformation.
These costs really depend on the size of the
house and how much attention the home needs.
While this may sound like a lot of money to
spend to prepare your home for the market, this
cost is always less than what the first price cut
on the house would be.
Placing a home on the market is an
emotional and time-consuming experience, but
waiting for the house to actually sell can be
downright traumatic! Remember that potential
buyers form an opinion on a home within 15
seconds of walking in the front door. Barb
Schwartz contends that professionally staged
homes tend to sell faster and for more money.
In fact, she suggests that the selling price may
increase anywhere from 2 to 10 percent in a
slow market and from 20 to 50 percent in a
robust one, and that they may sell as much as
40 to 50 percent more quickly than nonprofessionally
staged homes.
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