Fsbo

Sellers hire them to declutter and rearrange. Now, buyers are turning to them, too

When Ilse Hadda sold her roomy, three-bedroom house a year ago to move into a two-bedroom condo in Berkeley, Calif., she struggled to arrange her old furniture in her new space. Familiar pieces that had fit together so naturally before no longer connected in the same homey way. Nothing seemed to work: Her seven large wooden bookshelves, standing together in the living/dining room area, looked awkward and a little overwhelming. She couldn’t find a space for her favorite leather chair amid the other furniture grouped around the living room fireplace. In an alcove off the master bedroom, her desk felt out of place and got in the way of the in-wall ironing board. "I was frustrated because it looked awful," she says.

Hadda turned to a surprising source for help: the "home stager" she’d hired earlier to strip the personality from her old home so it would be more attractive to potential buyers.

It’s not as strange as it sounds. Real-estate agents often recommend that sellers hire a home stager (also known as a real-estate enhancer) to whisk through their homes and "neutralize" them before they go on the market. When "staging to sell," a home stager, sometimes with the help of a team, stashes away personal items (your collection of antique dolls, for example, or the model boat on the mantel), repaints aggressively colored walls, and rearranges furniture and accessories to draw attention to a home’s best features. "Staging to live," as it’s called, is the logical next step. Having come to appreciate the clean, uncluttered look the stager achieved in their old homes, sellers are rehiring stagers to work the same magic in their new home. But this time, instead of seeking to depersonalize your abode, the emphasis is on organizing, decluttering, and rearranging to "de-stress" the environment, says Barb Schwarz, who’s been staging homes for more than 30 years and founded the International Association of Home Staging Professionals four years ago.

"It’s visual therapy," says Schwarz. "It’s about fine-tuning a space to improve its energy and the flow from room to room," she says. Schwarz estimates that about 40 percent of her staging-to-sell clients ask her to stage their new homes.

Staging is also about getting rid of familiar objects that homeowners are overly attached to, says interior designer Pat McMillan, coauthor of Home Decorating for Dummies . A stager "can be brutally honest" about disposing of clutter–and relegating tatty family heirlooms to the closet. (Just be sure to rehang Aunt Irma’s needlepoint before her annual visit.)

Want to hire a staging pro? Here’s how to do it.

Search: Homestaging.fizber.com lists professional stagers in every state in the Untited States.

Vet: Look at photos of rooms and homes they’ve staged, and talk to previous customers.

Price: Get a written bid, stating what will be done and how long it’ll take.

Insure: Make sure the stager has business insurance to cover broken china (or a broken leg) in the line of duty.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 7:21 am and is filed under FSBO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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