Staging a home: Pain and gain
There is painful moment in the process of selling a house when the real estate agent sits you down and tells you that your taste is... unique. No one else really likes that color in the living room. The chairs in the front hall probably shouldn't be in the front hall. And there's a shark jaw above the kitchen table. Have you ever noticed that?
This is staging, the painful process of scrubbing your home so someone else can imagine living there. In the video at right, my colleagues D.C. Denison and Ann Silvio take a look at the art of staging, which has become an industry. You can now hire a professional to stage your home. The video is the first installment in a monthly series for Boston. com, "Open House Crashers."
Silvio defines staging as "turning your home into a product with mass appeal." The top tip is the one we all hate to hear: Get rid of clutter. Adding flowers, pillows and fruit apparently also helps. My favorite tidbit: Stagers love to dress a bookshelf with a multi-volume home encyclopedia, which is something you don't see in real homes as much since the Internet came along.
In a down market, professionals say it's all the more important to make your home feel like someone else's home. You want to make your home easy to buy. The cost of hiring a professional runs from about $500 on up to several thousand.
"Staging a house will typically shorten the length of time a house is on the market and may result in a higher sales price," said Sheila Selby, an interior designer and a stager who operates the Boston-area firm On The Move Interiors. Her advice is featured in a slideshow.
You can also check out official advice from the National Association of Realtors.
A final gem from the video: Experts advise against staging the most expensive homes. Potential buyers often show up with their personal interior decorators, who like to see a blank canvas.
Sellers: Have you hired a professional stager? Did it help to sell your home?
As a broker, I help my clients stage their homes when they list them with me. I budget a percentage of my projected commission (which I anticipate is one side of the deal so 2.5% in most cases) to cover labor and some materials (the sellers pay out of pocket for some items such as new carpet or flooring or a light fixture) and then we get to work. I think of staging as more than smoke and mirrors and see it more as really preparing a house for the market by attending to that "to do" list that never was finished. My team has done everything from the simple stuff, such as rearranging furniture, adding accessories, cleaning a yard and the like to knowing who has the best rate on 10 yard dumpsters for the basement clean out, laying sod, building walkways, painting rooms, installing flooring, and getting licensed professionals in to fix or replace things like leaky faucets or light fixtures (with permits as needed). If the seller thinks that they want more work done that goes above what my budget for the property will cover, we work out the details and they pay something out of pocket, usually to a professional such as an electrician or plumber. My experience has been that paying attention to items that need to be completed is the best thing that can be done. Buyers are smart - they see that the walls are cracked behind the pretty sofa and that the bath mat covers an ugly tile floor.
I have also learned and tell my clients that even if you put lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig. I have walked away from listings when clients have unrealistic expectations of what a house will sell for because they think that brining in some flowers or setting up a dining room set is all that the house needs when what the place really needs is an extensive renovation. Staging and attending to projects has value, but the most important element of selling in this market is pricing that is right for the property in its market.
I'm going to take a 180 from my usual and agree with the real estate agents on here.
Staging a home is essential. In any market. It doesn't mean that a professional stager is required - often homeowners would be well served by listening to their real estate agent. A good one will know what needs to be done.
Buying a house is an emotional decision for most people. The house they are looking at has to fit the "vision" of how they'd like to live.
Sure, you don't have to do this, but you shouldn't expect top dollar otherwise.
And I've been amazed how resistant home sellers can be to even the most basic de-cluttering of their houses.
Fundamentally, most sellers seem to treat the transaction as an emotional one, not a business one.
I couldn't afford a professional, but my condo was on the market for a 6 months last year. i read an article on staging (on boston.com!) and went out & bought clean white towels, rug & shower curtain for the bathroom, puffy colorful pillows & soft throw-blankets for the bedroom, got rid of ALL nik-naks, plopped a big bowl of green apples on the table, tied back curtains w/ pretty ribbon to let in sunlight, lit a lightly scented candle and BOOM -- got an offer THAT week. after going to at least 60 open houses i've discovered MANY people could REALLY use the help of professionals...
The article failed to mention if you don't have a lot of money and your home is vacant (also hard to sell) the best thing to do is to get reliable housesitters by word of mouth. If you get the right kind of young single professional or a young couple, they come with their furniture and can help keep up the place too. I've been to a lot of places where the home just looks desolate and downright scary...I wonder why banks don't do this when they have so many homes on the market.
Staging is essential. My house was on the market in August and well staged. We had it under agreement within one week. That offer fell through and the house received another offer two weeks after that. I was in a horrible market (Fitchburg) and I have no doubt that we received so much interest so quickly because it showed so well.
Question - what if you're a seller with a different type of property - like an inner-city double or triple-decker - that you expect to sell to a buyer who may be a landlord, who will just treat it as empty spaces to stuff people into & rent out? Do you bother to stage it? Or just leave the place cleaned out?
It would seem to me those kind of property owners are not concerned about making it look like the place a buyer might want to live,
Don't mean to veer off topic, but the person who wrote "what if your home is empty" made me think of something important.
If your home is empty because you moved somewhere and couldn't sell, you should be very nervous. Your homeowners' insurance policy may not cover any damages, if the home should be burglarized or burns down.
I encountered this situation when we were selling my parents' home. We didn't sell it for a year and a half after they died (tilt-a-whirl accidents, both of them). If anything had happened to the house, we wouldn't have been covered.
Best thing to do is to have someone sleep over, at least ofr a couple nights a during the month.
Staging works.
Buyers always look at the wrong things--furniture, paint colors--and I've seen more than one person, back in the boom days, write an offer without having once gone down to the basement. Our place sold to the very first visitor, and I still think what they really liked was our furniture.
Having seen many open houses, I have a suggestion for sellers. You wouldn't have to pay cold hard cash for a stager if you tried, for example, simply not living like barn animals.
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