Grooming homes for attractive offers
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Authored by: JULIE TRIPP - Published in: The Oregonian
Created on: 2005-06-26
Home staging -- the process of preparing a home for sale with a little showbiz -- has caught on in Portland, keeping "stagers" booked with jobs and real estate agents hopping from sale to sale.
Stagers view a home through a potential buyer's eyes and try to enhance that all-important first impression. In the course of a day or two, they may change the flow of foot traffic, reduce clutter, take out or rearrange furniture and alter the landscaping. The before and after can be eye-popping.
"The sparkle factor sells homes," says Portland ReMax/Equity Group agent Ann Spanish Manion, who says she nearly always uses professional stagers when she's selling a home.
Like tax revolts and vegetarian cuisine, the home-staging wave is coming from California, although Barb Schwarz, founder of StagedHomes.com., says she actually coined the phrase in the 1970s when she was a real estate agent in Bellevue, Wash. Now Schwarz, who has homes in the San Francisco and Seattle areas, trains people at monthly workshops in each place. She also visits other cities, including an annual workshop in Portland.
Nationwide, about 20 percent of homes are staged for sale, a percentage Schwarz predicts is likely to rise to 25 percent by year's end. In some neighborhoods in Seattle and San Francisco, the percentage of staged homes is closer to 80 percent, she says.
In Portland, some real estate agents have a cadre of stagers they employ regularly to prepare their listings for sale. If it's a basic staging -- a walk-through followed by clutter removal, changes in furnishings and other embellishments -- the agent may pay from $400 to $800 for the work and include it as part of the service that comes out of the commission earned when the home sells.
If more significant improvements and changes are required, the stager may bring in other workers and be paid by the homeowner on a job basis or by the hour.
Some brokers use stagers routinely, while others bring them in for help when a home languishes on the market too long. And sometimes, homeowners looking for a decorative pick-me-up employ them even when they don't intend to sell. Several Portland stagers have full-blown interior design businesses, too, but the work is different.
"Staging is not decorating," says Schwarz. "Decorating is for living; staging is for selling."
To learn more, we talked to a number of real estate agents and stagers in the Portland area.
Q. What does a staged home look like?
A. Well-tended and trim from the street, clean and inviting on the inside. At night, light will highlight the landscaping and emit warmth from the interior. Each room will look spacious, with focal points of color and interest. If the seller has moved out, there will be all new furnishings in place. If the seller is living there, half of his furnishings, on average, and most of the accessories will be placed in storage. Items will be moved or used in different ways. The stager may bring in his or her own accessories or furniture.
There will be no clutter, anywhere.
Q. What does staging entail?
A. The essence of staging, as with the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is "less is more," says Schwarz. "Not cold, not stripped," she says. Just pared down.
"We're selling your house, not your things," she tells homeowners. "We've got to merchandise it, set the stage in each room."
Q. Is it worth the cost?
A. Agents who use stagers don't guarantee that you'll get a higher price or quicker sale as a result, but they obviously believe that is the case or they wouldn't shell out for the service.
"In many instances, it's brought my clients more money," Manion says. "Spending $1,000 to $2,000 can make a difference of $10,000 to $20,000 in the price of the house."
"You have to be careful about promising too much," says Manion, "but 90 percent of the time, it works."
Q. Will the house sell more quickly?
A. Most agents and stagers have stories about how tweaking a home's presentation has sped up a sale.
Gail Warren, stager and owner of Eclectic Interiors, recalls a Laurelhurst home not too long ago that had great basic structure -- "good bones" -- but a tired, lived-in look. The house had been shown 75 times in one week and still had no offers.
"That says something's wrong," Warren said. The potential buyers liked the neighborhood and the price range enough to visit, but not enough to buy. The agent took it off the market for one weekend and called Warren.
"I worked one and half days there," she said. "They painted and pressure washed, I reworked all the rooms, took stuff out and brought stuff in, put new drapes in the dining room, a little tree in the corner.
"The brokers toured again Tuesday, and by Thursday, we had three offers, all full price. That's when you know it was you," she says of her work.
Q. Does staging hide defects?
A. No, says Patrick Henry, agent for Coldwell Banker/Barbara Sue Seal. Staging embellishes the look and personality of a home but it doesn't cover up problems a buyer should know about. Material defects will be discovered in home inspections, regardless, Henry says.
To prevent a buyer from becoming mesmerized with a staged home, a good agent will warn his buyer client to envision their own furnishings and taste in a home. If he sees a possible flaw -- a lousy traffic pattern, for example -- he makes sure his client sees it and isn't distracted by the banana palm in the other corner.
Stager Todd McAllister, who operates On Stage as well as his own interior design shop, says he plays up a home's good features.
"People can overlook the bad features when they see the potential," he says. He put a bookcase in front of a basement's sump pump at one home, he says, to distract the eye, not to hide the reason it was there. The home inspection would be expected to reveal any problems with water in the basement.
Likewise, Gail Warren says she wouldn't cover up a floor stain with a rug, but she might place a chair near the stain to distract the eye.
Q. What homes don't need staging?
A. Houses in need of major rehabilitation won't profit from staging's cosmetics.
"If a home is in such disrepair, or is so out of date that staging is out of the question, I tell them that there is a huge market for rehabbers and we should sell it as is," Manion says.
And at the other end of the spectrum, "some people do a great job themselves," says Gail Warren. "If it's not overstuffed and it looks awesome, they don't need me."
Julie Tripp does not give financial advice. For questions, call her at 503-221-8208 or e-mail julietripp@news.oregonian.com. For reprints of this or a previous column, call 503-221-8242.
Article entered in the Staged Homes System: 2005-07-07
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