Sellers Turn to Pros to Dress Up Their Homes

For sellers, it's a stressful real estate market: Lots of houses are available; buyers look and look, leaving them panicked and their agents frantic.

But increasingly, some are suggesting a possible cure for the angst: staging, or decorating a house to appeal to the target buyer.

Staging is "part of an overall marketing plan for individual houses, to set them apart from others for sale in the neighborhood," said Prudential Fox & Roach agent Bari Shor.

HomeGain, an online service that generates real estate leads, surveyed 2,000 member-agents nationwide last fall about the value of staging.

The results indicated that professional staging, which typically costs several hundred dollars, added $1,938 to $2,431 to the sale price of a house.

Ninety-one percent of the agents surveyed recommended professional staging as a marketing tool.

And with houses in many areas staying on the market longer than they did a year ago, every tool can be important.

"Homeowners are beginning to understand . . . that proper staging can give them a competitive edge," said Susan Brown of Creative Staging in Bucks County, Pa.

"We are definitely beyond busy," Brown said, crediting a change among agents eager to move houses and growing consumer familiarity with staging from a spate of real estate TV shows.

Typically, staging aims to create spaces that buyers can see themselves living in. That might mean setting up a breakfast area in a kitchen where none exists or clustering an armchair and ottoman in a comfortable reading nook. At its most basic, staging includes de-cluttering and cleaning, to refresh rooms.

David Boerner of Long & Foster Real Estate called in Brown to help sell the Doylestown, Pa., house that Deborah Yerger bought in 1999 for $185,000 and then rented.

"I didn't want to keep it, so I put the house on the market for sale in the summer," Yerger said. Listed at $399,000, the house has sat unoccupied -- and unsold.