Shining a light on your home's best assets

But Coldwell Banker agent Pauline Donnelly isn't taking any chances these days in this down housing market. If her client wanted to fetch around $600,000, the condo would need an extreme makeover. So Burton, who is moving to a retirement community in New Hampshire, dutifully put all her furniture in storage to make way for the stagers, the people who use their design acumen and a collection of furnishings to showcase a property's potential and mask its shortcomings. Burton had never heard of such a profession before.

Donnelly's no-holds-barred strategy reflects the hard reality of this market: Unless you plan to satisfy buyers' expectations for fire sale prices, your property better be carefully packaged and presented - both online and in reality - and be as close to immaculate as possible. Buyers are apprehensive enough these days without having to worry about cracks in the paint and what they may portend.

"You want buyers to be excited about a property and to make a quick decision," said Donnelly. "Buyers tend to be really superficial and if you ask them to imagine themselves living in an empty home, most can't do it."

One indication that many sellers are reaching the same conclusion: Stagers report that they are busier than ever, even in this supposedly glum real estate market.

Blair Hamaty, president of Setting the Space, the Plymouth-based company that staged Burton's Beacon Hill condo, estimates he currently has 75 stagings booked, well more than a year ago.

"There's a smaller amount of property out there, but owners are opting to stage to get an edge over the competition," Hamaty said. "Most buyers are really busy, or they're going to be starting a family. They're not gung ho to start fixing things up after they move in. People want a turnkey situation." In addition to owning around $750,000 in furnishings, the company also does touch-up and minor repair work.

Cathy Woodruff said business has been steady for the past couple of years at about a house a week. "Business has never changed," said Woodruff, who started her staging business in Cambridge four years ago and who conceded that when she and her husband were first looking for a house, she thought staging was "a stupid business."

Since then, she's acquired a warehouse full of furniture. "Granted it's a different market here," she said, referring to rising prices in Cambridge. "The successful brokers here know how important it is to stage. So it's a good time to be me."

Alma Dell Smith is a true believer in staging. For more than three months last year, she and her husband had been trying to sell their townhouse in the Kenmore Square area. They lowered the price by $30,000. At the urging of a new broker, they took the house off the market and had it staged. The couple had been using the house as a home office, and once it was thoroughly cleared out, Setting the Space had it touched up and furnished in a contemporary European style.

"They made it look like the most upscale place you can imagine," said Smith.

Once back on the market, it sold in two weeks, for close to the original asking price, around $670,000 - and two weeks after it went under agreement, they got an even higher offer.

Of course, there are different levels of staging, brokers say, and plenty of creative things can be done short of hiring a professional stager to make a property stand out. Gail Hall, a broker in Hingham, has started holding open houses in the evenings for commuters where she serves sangria and Mexican food. She stresses small touches, such as putting out fresh flowers.

"You're trying to put a positive impact on a property, and these small things come to mind," she said.

For most buyers these days, the first impression they have of a property is online, and many brokers are applying these same principles to Internet listings, as well as investing in their own websites, with market reports, blogs, and ties to social networking sites, such as Facebook.

"According to the latest surveys, close to 90 percent of buyers start their search online," said Philip Vineburgh of Charlesgate Realty Group. "Professional photography, floor plans, virtual tours" - which offer 360-degree panoramas of selected rooms - "all of these are key to getting people to go from online to actually viewing a place. They want to get a good sense of what's actually going on in a place before going to a showing."

No broker pretends that any amount of glitzy marketing can overcome the hard reality of pricing. Sellers still have to price their property right: Starting with a realistic price is an integral part of the marketing process, said Donnelly of Coldwell Banker.

"It has to be priced well from the beginning. You don't want to try for a higher price point and see what happens. Buyers will immediately look past it, and when it's reduced people will wonder what's wrong with this place that it's been on the market this many days," she said.

And so Joan Burton's Beacon Hill condo, for which she paid $185,000 in 1993, is now on the market for $599,000, newly appointed with contemporary furniture, artwork, and a bowl of fresh fruit on the kitchen counter.

"It feels like living in a nice hotel," Burton said of her condo's new look. "Now we'll find out how the market feels about it."