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Stage effects

Temporary furnishings a popular way to market homes

John Rebchook, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 14, 2006 at midnight

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Shai Egosi was ready to eat a several thousand dollar loss on his house.

His company transferred him to the Tampa, Fla., area and he couldn't sell his 2,500-square-foot home in Centennial for $345,000, the amount he had paid for it two years earlier.

"We had countless showings but zero offers," said Egosi, a vice president of an information technology company.

After lowering his asking price twice, he went with a new agent when his listing agreement with the first broker expired.

The new agent received a full-price offer in one day and two more backup offers, also for the full asking price. Egosi still took a loss, given commissions and other expenses, but for months he feared it could have been even worse.

At one point, he even questioned if the house would sell at all.

What made this house stand out from the more than 31,000 other homes on the market in the Denver area?

The agent, Daniel Toske of Keller Williams hired a company to "stage" the home. It's an increasingly popular way to help market homes in Denver and across the country, as it has become more difficult to persuade buyers to sign on the dotted line.

"Staging was the biggest thing," Egosi said. "There is no creativity whatsoever in our society. So you pull in a couple of fake couches and a couple of fake beds, and it looks like home, and you can sell it."

Toske said the makeover, by Staging Denver, cost Egosi about $2,000.

"I use stagings for most of the listings I do now," Toske said. "In fact, when I sold my own home back in July I had it staged. And I had it under contract in one day, too."

Staging Denver owner Geri Bigum said that in today's sluggish housing market, homeowners shouldn't even consider selling their home without hiring an expert to give their house the "wow" factor.

"It used to be a plus, and now it is a must," she said.

The home-staging industry, with almost no barriers to entry, also has grown by leaps and bounds, giving consumers more of a choice but also making it difficult to choose the right one.

"I'm guessing there might be up to 100 stagers in the Denver area, while a few years ago you could have counted them all on one hand," said Erica Starich of Star Interior Solutions.

She said people have become familiar with the concept, especially with the various home improvement programs on HGTV, (a cable channel owned by E.W. Scripps, the parent of the Rocky Mountain News).

While no one apparently tracks the number of home stagers, there are 10,225 accredited staging professionals in the U.S. and Canada, who have taken courses through a company called StagedHomes, which has offices in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago.

The company was founded by Barb Schwarz, an industry pioneer who started in the business in 1976 and is credited with creating the term home staging, said Gina Vierra, spokeswoman for the company's nonprofit arm, the International Association of Home Staging Professionals.

This year, 3,757 people have been accredited, a 44 percent increase from the 2,609 in all of 2005, said Vierra, director of operations for the association.

"And we expect to double that number next year," Vierra said. "The demand for classes is just huge."

Staging can range from instructing homeowners to remove all personal photographs to moving the plunger away from the toilet (it raises questions about the plumbing), to completely furnishing a vacant house, said Bigum, owner of Staging Denver.

Bigum turned her eye for decorating into a staging business nine years ago.

She wanted a business in which she could work with her oldest daughter, a nanny between jobs at the time.

She found she had a knack for the business after working with a former decorator who went to her church and helping a real estate agent sell a home by doing things such as rearranging the furniture.

Bigum now has enough furniture on hand to furnish about three dozen homes at any given time.

Bigum charges anywhere from $200 for a consulting fee - where she gives out pointers such as rearranging furniture and removing clutter - to the full refurnishing of rooms in a vacant house.

A full-blown home staging will set the owner back anywhere from 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the sales price. In other words, it will cost about $3,000 to stage a $300,000 house.

She has staged everything from an $80,000 row home in the Highland neighborhood in northwest Denver that she and a business partner bought as an investment several years ago, to a $5.7 million home in the mountains.

One area she has shied away from are foreclosures.

"In a foreclosure, when you talk with the Realtors listing it, they would love to have you come to the house and make it more presentable, but there is no money to pay for it," Bigum said.

Also, foreclosures often have maintenance issues that must be fixed first, she said.

Bigum recently became curious about quantifying the impact of staging and found that the last 30 homes she staged sold in an average of 32 days, while in the Denver area it typically takes more than 100 days to sell a house.

According to national statistics gathered by StagedHomes, a staged home on average sells for 6.9 percent more than a nonstaged home and sells 50 percent faster.

Mary Beth Goodspeed, owner of Upstairs Downstairs Inc., said that staging a home is "imperative with all of the competition" from other unsold homes in the Denver-area market.

"Staging has been very commonplace on the East Coast and West Coast for a number of years," Goodspeed said. "Now it is becoming all of the rage in Denver. It seemed to have really caught on in Denver in the last year."

She estimates that a third to 60 percent of the homes in the Denver area that are priced above $250,000 are now being staged.

She cited a home in central Denver that languished on the market for about four months.

"They brought in a stager and it sold immediately for close to $600,000," she said.

Connie O'Neill opened Stages LLC in Greeley two years ago, but so far is doing all her work in the Denver area.

For O'Neill, the sweet spot has been homes priced in the $200,000s and the $300,000s, although she said she knows others who focus on homes that are priced at $1 million or more.

"I think the slowdown in the (home sale) market has been causing a little bit of an increase in staging in the last few months," O'Neill said.

She quit her job working at a health department to go into the staging business.

"In a good market, staging assures you will get the absolute best price for your home," she said. "In a slow market, staging really reduces the time it takes to sell a home."

Stager Starich said it is a small price to pay, especially in Denver's tough home-sales market. "It's cheaper than one price reduction," she said.

Tips on selling homes

• Don't overprice. One Realtor looked at 15 homes Wednesday and thought 14 of them were overpriced.

• Remove all personal items such as family photos. They will only distract prospective buyers.

• Make sure your house is model-home clean and uncluttered.

• Paint your walls in a neutral color. That "trendy orange" may appeal to you but likely will turn off others.

• Consider baking cookies or have coffee brewing during an open house, but don't go overboard with anything that will create heavy smells.

• Always include the price of a home and square footage in fliers and Web pages. Buyers don't like to hunt for that information.

• Don't put conditions on showings such as the owner needs 48 hours' notice.

StagedHomes at a glance

Concord, Calif.-based company teaches professional staging techniques

• CEO/founder: Barb Schwarz

• Accredited stagers: 10,225 total in the U.S. and Canada

• Accredited year to date: 3,757 - a 44 percent increase from the 2,609 stagers accredited by StagedHomes in 2005

• Cost of staging: 0.75 percent to 1.25 percent of the sales price

• Benefits of staging: Homes sell for an average price of 6.9 percent more than non-staged homes and sell 50 percent faster.Source:Stagedhomes

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