Special Report: Staging Your Home for Sale
Back in the day, it was pretty easy putting your house on the market. Wash the dishes, pass the vacuum over the carpet, and take the kids, the dog, and husband to the playground while strangers trooped through your rooms. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could bake fresh cookies or light scented candles.
Today, readying your home for sale is a whole different project, thanks to the concept of home staging. The idea is that by making your home look good, you can get a better price in a shorter time on the market, and it's becoming so popular that it's generating a new industry in interior design and real estate. But the concept of home staging is more complex than just stuffing some fresh flowers in a vase and rearranging the furniture. In some ways, the idea behind staging runs counter to the usual approach of home design. Usually, the aim of interior design is to make the home stylish while emphasizing the owner's personality and tastes. But in staging, the aim is to make the home look as neutral as possible, so that the buyers can imagine themselves living there, no matter how different their tastes may be from that of the sellers. "Staging is creating a 'look' that sells," Cari Pilon of SmartDesigns says. "The home becomes a house; the house becomes a saleable product."
Sheffield Top Tip: Sometimes staging really is as simple as clearing away clutter, repositioning a chair, and properly hanging artwork, but it can also mean putting some of the larger pieces of furniture into storage, painting the walls a neutral color, installing new window treatments, and rearranging the furniture. "The goal of staging is to put a house's best foot forward, and give it the gloss of a marketable commodity," Pilon said. "The addition of fresh flowers or green plants brings life to a room. A bowl of fruit will add a dash of color to a bland kitchen."
Diane Wildowsky, an agent based in New York City with Sotheby's International Real Estate, has used staging to sell the last four properties she's listed. "In all cases but one we achieved at or above the asking price, and we sold the places within two weeks of listing them," she said. None of the apartments had been renovated, and they all needed a special feature to spark the buyer's interest.
"We wanted a 'wow' when prospective buyers came into the space, and we wanted them to feel very comfortable and at home. You can't always get a 'wow' factor, but you can get an 'ahhh, this feels good,'" Wildowsky said.
Some of this is obvious: Of course a room that is free of bulky furniture and has none of the usual clutter of daily life will be more appealing, and anyone can see that painting the wall that's neon green a neutral beige would help sell the place. But staging often goes a step further than this, into the psychology of the buyer.
"We create a place that anybody could call home," Pilon said. In part, this is done "by creating a narrative and a driving concept about the life that will be led in the home." For example, a dining room that looks ready to host a dinner for eight will make the buyers feel they'll have a happy social life in the home.
This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a yard sale and buy new furniture; staging relies heavily on using what the owners already have, while bringing out its best features. A good stager will not only spruce up a home, but will also create a unified theme for the home that will appeal to a variety of prospective buyers. For example, if the seller's furniture is heavy on the Art Deco look, the stager may enhance that by putting away the computer equipment, hanging an inexpensive Deco print on the wall, and playing 1940s jazz during the open house.
Wildowsky has found that staging helps offset a problem commonly faced by real estate agents, that not every property has a stand-out feature that will help to sell it. Often, an older place, whether it's an urban apartment or a Victorian house, will have loads of charm, but it'll be difficult to sell when it's competing with places with lots of updated amenities.
One such apartment listed with Sotheby's was in a lovely brick building in Greenwich Village, a popular Manhattan neighborhood. The building had no elevator, no doorman, no rooftop patio, no special amenities whatsoever. Furthermore, the small apartment had only three tiny closets, sloping floors, and only some of the wooden window frames had been striped of their decades of paint. The walls were painted in wildly bright colors, and the toys and paraphernalia of three kids were scattered about.
Rather than run screaming from the room, Wildowsky called in the stager, who suggested first clearing out the clutter and doing a professional cleaning. "Our stager needed only ten minutes to know exactly the right changes to make," Wildowsky said. " We toned down the colors. In the bedroom, instead of turquoise, we used a soft mint green, which was accented with Ralph Lauren sheets, bed spread and pillow shams."
In the living room, an assortment of mis-matched rugs suited the owners, but contributed to the cluttered look, so Wildowsky bought matching rugs to the help pull the room together. She also planted the bare window boxes with flowers.
"One of the biggest, most striking changes was to paint the window frames that had not been fully stripped. We chose a paint the same color as the natural wood of the window frames that had been stripped. Thus your eye hit a smooth line of a single color when you entered the apartment. Within one week our client had worked magic on her apartment. It was a different space entirely by the time of our first open house — cheerful, bright, homey — we had offers the first day and ultimately sold $25,000 above ask."
The evidence about how well staging works isn't just anecdotal. A 2004 study conducted by the National Association of REALTORS ® showed that staged homes sold 50 percent faster than non-staged homes. And in 2003, The Wall Street Journal reported that in a moderate market, prices of staged homes increased from two to ten percent.
Home staging is becoming so popular that Pilon now trains others to become stagers in Florida and Michigan.
The success of television shows that feature home design in general and staging in particular has contributed to the blossoming interest in staging, Pilon says.
"The increase in popularity of home staging shows on television has really spurred the interest in home staging, but what keeps the momentum strong is the word of mouth from those who have tried it and seen its success," she says.
The current surge in staging could also be attributable in part to the slower housing market — when there are fewer buyers, the real estate agents have to pull out all the stops to get buyers in the door and signing an offer. Because staging works so well, agents are recommending it to more of their clients. In a competitive market, agents feel they need more of a hook to get clients to choose them over another agent, and staging is one specialty they can offer.
"Some agents are including staging with their listing package as a way of differentiating themselves from other real estate professionals. But the bottom line is that the real estate market is so competitive that people know they have to do something different to make their home stand out above the competition," Pilon said.
The most common mistake, Pilon said, that homeowners make when preparing to sell is to ignore "curb appeal." First impressions, according to Pilon, really do count, and yet the look of the outside of the house is often forgotten by sellers.
"Curb appeal can dictate whether or not the buyer wants to see inside. Maintaining the yard work and landscaping is hard work, but must be done. Simply adding small touches like a pot of flowers or a wreath on the door can increase the appeal of the entry. Small touches like that subtly tell potential buyers that this is a well loved and cared for home."
For Wildowsky, the "curb appeal" is largely out of the control of the owner, as an apartment owner can't make changes in the facade of the building.
"In an apartment building, you can't always control the entrance of the property," Wildowsky said. "Sometimes you can't do much about the hallways, but you can give your space within the building that extra punch so that other less attractive features of the property melt away or disappear altogether."
One reason it really works to hire a stager is that all homeowners get used to the quirks in their homes — those little things that you just live with, rather than repairing.
"A particular challenge for homeowners is taking themselves out of the home," Pilon said. "For example, every time the homeowners enter the house the door handle jiggles or the door sticks. The homeowner has lived there for so long it becomes acceptable. But to a potential buyer, it is a red flag. The jiggly door handle implies deferred maintenance, which makes the buyer wonder what other maintenance has been deferred."
Or maybe you've inherited a few pieces of furniture and you haven't yet decided what to keep, leaving you with an overstuffed living room of mis-matched pieces. Before you put your place on the market is the time re-evaluate, plan the décor of your new home, and to get rid of the things you won't be keeping.
"Having a professional stager or even another objective opinion to tell you how others will view your home puts you at an advantage," Pilon said.
This was proven in the case of one of Wildowsky's clients, a young woman selling a studio apartment. The place was sparsely furnished, and essentially hadn't been decorated in the three years that she'd owned it. The only striking thing the owner had done was to paint one wall a rich eggplant, and she had installed a modern light fixture with glass shelving.
"Unfortunately, that wall was at your back as you entered the room. It wasn't until you were fully in the space and turned that you saw how striking the wall looked," she said.
"In order to create a subtle sense of drama, our stager suggested painting a tructural column on the opposite wall this same color, as well as a smaller indented wall only 3 inches in width."
A tall bamboo tree in a planter between the column and the windows, two paintings, and a re-positioned computer table changed the look of the space. "Everyone who came in commented on how beautiful the space looked and how spacious the apartment felt, despite its three hundred and eighty square feet," Wildowsky said.
Pilon and Wildowsky have both found that sometimes owners are a bit queasy about the idea of a stranger coming in and re-doing their place to suit not themselves, but a faceless potential buyer.
"Sometimes we encounter resistance from homeowners about making changes, but usually it is because of other reasons," Pilon said. "Perhaps they are not emotionally prepared to sell their home. Death, divorce and job relocation are some primary reasons that people sell their home and they aren't always happy about the prospect of selling."
Wildowsky tries emphasizing to the owner that the staging is not be taken as a critique of their taste or their decorating skills, but is just about selling the home quickly and for a great price.
"Not all owners understand that staging is about getting the right price for the space — it's not a reflection on them or their tastes," she said. "Sometimes you do have to sell the idea to your client because as the changes begin, people often feel their space is being invaded. You have to keep the seller thinking about their new home and to mentally to let go of their current home. And as Tom Hanks tells Meg Ryan — 'it's not personal; it's business.' "
That helps, as does reminding the client that the decorator, the realtor, and the owner are all working together for a common goal: to sell the house quickly for a good price.
"We really focus on teamwork," Pilon said. "By working together with the homeowner, making suggestions, and providing justification for those suggestions, we can generally get the homeowner on board with making the necessary changes."
It isn't only the home that's in a state of design chaos that can cause an owner to cringe at the idea of staging. The owner who's put a lot of effort into getting things just right can be particularly resistant to making changes.
"People feel that their home is decorated beautifully, and sometimes it is, but they have decorated it to their tastes, not to the tastes of the broad general buyer. Making subtle changes can help appeal to the many instead of the few," Pilon said.
In terms of what is best to focus on in staging or re-designing for sale, the popular idea that kitchen and bath bring the greatest return seems to be holding fast, because these two rooms are both crucial to the home and they're the most expensive to re-do.
"By eliminating any objections in those rooms, you will receive higher offers than if those rooms were left untouched," Pilon said. "We recommend getting the biggest bang for your buck by looking at replacing smaller items first light lighting, cabinet hardware, appliances and such, and then looking at flooring and countertops."
One thing that's helping to popularize home staging is that it doesn't have to be expensive. Pilon's company tries to use what is already there as much as possible, adding just a few props or doing a quick paint job in one room, all of which runs between about $300 and $800. If a home is unoccupied, it can cost more to sparsely furnish it.
"There is a myth that home stagers come in, take out all the furniture and replace it with all new things. That is never the case with us," Pilon said. "We try to only use what the homeowner currently has to keep costs down. If their furniture is in poor condition, we find ways to alter it's appearance with slipcovers or pillows."
Click here to read Cari Pilon's tips for staging your own home.
Resources
- Cari Pilon
scSMARTdesign, Inc.
(810) 853-0053 - Diane Wildowsky
Sotheby's International Realty – Downtown Manhattan Brokerage
(212) 431-2440
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