Prospective home buyers make their buying
decisions within five seconds of walking into a house.
Fact or fiction? "It takes just a few seconds for a
prospective buyer to get an impression and know whether
they want to buy your house or not," says Susan Bowman, a
real estate agent with Kent Associates in Marin County.
So, when you're getting your home ready to sell, what
can you do to encourage a quick yes?
Home staging is the secret weapon of real estate
agents and their savvy clients. And staging sometimes
results in several prospective buyers saying yes. When
that happens, there's no telling how much over your
asking price you'll get when a bidding war starts.
While staging is certainly about clearing the clutter
and rearranging the furniture -- the stuff that distracts
the eye -- it also can include painting, carpeting,
landscaping and redecorating. And in the extreme case or
for a new house, home staging can be decorating from
scratch, and quickly. Whatever the degree of staging you
do, it can make a significant difference in how quickly
and for how much your home sells.
Does it make much difference? Just ask John and Carol
Sauer. Their Mill Valley house hadn't been redecorated
since they moved into it 13 years earlier. Last fall,
they put it on the market, but it didn't sell. They took
it off the market for the holiday season and at the
beginning of the year became serious about selling. Their
real estate agent, Jane Richmond of Pacific Union,
strongly encouraged them to stage the house because it
would show better.
"It needed more than just taking stuff off the
dressers," Richmond says. "There was a definite '70s
feeling to the place that could be easily updated with
the right approach."
Staging makes a house appeal to the widest possible
range of people. Prospective buyers want to imagine
themselves, not you, living in the house. That means
putting away personal items.
"When you stage your house, you have to realize that
it's not your home anymore," John Sauer says. Richmond
brought in a professional stager for a consultation. The
stager suggested the house needed recarpeting, repainting
in places, rearranging of some furniture and, for the
family room, a key selling feature in any house, complete
refurnishing.
With that in mind, the Sauers sorted through their
personal items, determining which to keep and which to
give away or toss. They packed what they kept.
Then the staging work began.
The '70s feeling came from the natural wood trim on
all the windows and doors. This was dramatically changed
simply by painting it all white. The walls, which were
light beige, were in good condition and left alone.
All the carpeting in the bedrooms and halls was
replaced, giving the house a fresher, more updated
appearance. The furniture was simply rearranged to appear
more inviting, except in the well-loved family room,
which was completely overhauled with new furniture,
plants and accessories.
The house was put back on the market for more than the
previous asking price. The Sauers immediately got five
offers. Their house sold within the first week for far
more than the new asking price. The time and money the
Sauers invested in preparing the house was realized many
times over in the price they got.
"What helped us was the initial meeting. We got ideas
about what should be changed and how it would look,"
Sauer says. "We also realized that the professional
stager should be given as much autonomy as possible for
this process to work well." This is because stagers are
not emotionally attached to the house or its furnishings,
and they know what feeling the buyer is looking for when
walking in the door.
How do you know whether your home is a good candidate
for staging?
Put yourself in the place of a prospective home buyer.
Walk through your front door as if you've never been in
the house. Look hard. Be objective. Get past the familiar
feeling of coming home. What do you see, and how do you
feel? If you can't be objective, recruit a close friend
to be honest, not polite.
If the feeling is chaos jumping out at you, your house
is definitely a good candidate for staging.
Some basic things can help make a house show well.
Clear the clutter. Take everything off the dresser, the
mantle, the refrigerator door, the kitchen and bathroom
counters. Everything. After you've thoroughly cleaned all
the surfaces, put just a few nice pieces back. A stager's
trick is to add three interesting pieces, grouped
together rather than spread out. This creates visual
appeal.
Sort, toss or store neatly all that stuff in the
closets, cabinets, shelves and storage areas. There are
companies that help people sort through years of
accumulation so this burdensome chore can be lifted from
your shoulders.
Clean. A clean, neat house always shows better than
one where dust bunnies lurk in corners and beds are
unmade. For more basics see "Staging Tips" on this
page.
Sometimes staging your home is too much to handle; the
furniture's too old, there's no one to give you honest
answers about whether your house looks great or you have
to move before the house sells and you can't leave
everything behind until it does. Then what do you do?
Bring in a professional stager -- someone with a
trained eye, a warehouse full of designer furniture,
accessories to die for and thriving plants.
Watching a stager is like watching a magician. A
stager can move a sofa from one side of the room to
another and completely change the feeling and focus in
that space. A stager offers not only a fresh perspective,
but an understanding of why a change is important. They
also bring with them a Rolodex full of resources to get
the necessary work done quickly.
Typically, the real estate agent decides the overall
impression the house should convey to the buyer, then
calls in the stager. The stager comes into the house and
takes notes. They look at how traffic flows in a space
and how to highlight the good architectural focal points
and minimize the awkward ones. They think about what
furniture style will best suit the house and provide the
most appeal to prospective buyers.
If the owner's furniture will be left in the house,
they recommend what to remove and what to bring to
enhance what's there. Depending on how much preparation
is necessary, recommendations may include remodeling old
bathrooms, replacing appliances, painting, carpeting and
landscaping. As with the Sauers, this work is done
first.
If it's a large staging project, it's not uncommon to
see a stager arrive with several trucks filled with
furniture, bolts of fabric, boxes of accessories and
tall, dramatic plants. An installation can take from a
couple of days to a week, depending on the size of the
house and the scope of work.
Some stagers have warehouses full of furniture, others
rely on suppliers who work exclusively with professional
stagers, and others rent pieces from large, national
furniture rental companies.
Almost all stagers have their own inventory of
accessories, the stock-in-trade items that they've
collected. This inventory is usually quite large, covers
a lot of different decorating styles and creates the
ultimate look of a room. Some stagers rent accessories
from showrooms and stores. And art dealers often lend or
rent pieces to give their artists exposure.
As a final touch, stagers add those wonderful large,
healthy plants. Most of the time they're real plants and
have to be professionally maintained. This is included in
the staging package.
There are as many prices to staging as there are
stagers in the business. And, like buying a car, the
price depends on the style in which you want to
arrive.
Often the real estate agent pays for the initial
consultation because a lot can be accomplished in that
meeting. Also, the stager can say things to the homeowner
that the agent might feel awkward about saying, since the
agent has a longer- term relationship with the
seller.
A one-hour consultation gets ideas on the table about
the scope of the project and the time line necessary to
get all the work done. Typically a consultation of this
nature is included in the price of the staging, but if
it's a small project and the homeowner will do most of
the work, this meeting might cost from $100 to $400,
depending on its length.
A basic staging involving some furniture
rearrangments, the use of some accessories and plants,
and about a day's work costs around $2,000 at the low
end. The price of a full empty-house staging, on the
other hand, has been known to cost as much as $30,000.
But this represented a fraction of the asking price for a
house listed at several million dollars. The house sold
the first day it was shown to brokers for $1 million over
the asking price.
The Sauers spent $25,000 to prepare their home for
sale. The selling price of their home increased by more
than 10 times that amount. "The price we got was 30
percent more than an offer which fell through five months
earlier," John Sauer says -- not an insignificant return
on their staging investment. Whatever level of staging
you do, it will make a noticeable difference in your
favor.
TO GO TO A
COMPLETE LIST OF ARTICLES THAT BERYN HAMMIL HAS WRITTEN,
CLICK HERE
