Sellers Turn to Pros to Dress Up Their Homes

"The house was in pretty good shape," said David Bell, "but the market was sluggish, and we wanted to sell quickly because we had to move." The couple had paid $433,000 for the house in 2000.

Diane Williams, an accredited stager with Weichert Realtors in Spring House, Pa., took a look, priced the house at $670,000 and called in another stager, Kim Kratz, before listing it.

"The house was in fine shape and nicely furnished, but I thought that it needed just a little polish," Kratz said.

She spent the better part of a week getting it ready for the market, charging $200 upfront for her analysis. The total staging cost was $1,200, David Bell said.

Kratz had the Bells remove some furniture to open up the space, and she rearranged pieces in the family room. Some walls needed painting, which the Bells did themselves, though many stagers have staff do it or refer sellers to contractors.

Kratz provided about $2,000 worth of accessories -- vases, candles, artwork, "even a wrought-iron headboard mounted on the wall behind a bed that needed it," said Bell.

A couple of weeks after the staging was complete, Jay Kreiling, designated by his wife, Hope, to find a house in the area, made an offer.

"I didn't see it until after he bought it," Hope Kreiling said. "He was already here, and I was back in Colorado, waiting to be able to move."

She left the decision to Jay, she said, because she had already made three house-hunting trips, looked at 30 to 40 houses and found nothing.

"You'd see them on the Internet and they looked wonderful, but when you saw them in person, they didn't look anything like the pictures," Hope said.

The couple liked the Ambler house enough to pay $645,000 and would have paid full price if the appraiser had agreed, Williams said.

To sell the 3,800-square-foot, two-story contemporary in Blue Bell, Pa., that they bought for $410,000 in 1993, Jeffrey and Susan Brown (not the Susan Brown of Creative Staging) needed more help from Kratz than the Bells did. Their house was listed for $700,000, but "if we hadn't staged it, we never would have sold it," said Susan.

"The house was too customized," she said, "so Kim had a crew in here that had to do a lot of work, including painting just about every room." Kratz tailored the paint palette to the contemporary architecture.

The Browns' home also needed furniture, Kratz said, to flesh out the "playrooms" used by 8-year-old twin boys and a big dog. She keeps pieces in storage but deals with a rental company for big jobs.

After just three days on the market, the staged house sold in June for $660,000.