Homebuyers can find it difficult to imagine themselves living in somebody else’s home, especially if rooms are either empty or too full of personal belongings.
Enter home staging, in which owners arrange (often someone else’s) furnishings in ways meant to be attractive to potential buyers to show them how they can use a space.
For homebuyers, the living room, primary bedroom, and kitchen are most important when it comes to staging, according to a report published this month by the National Association of Realtors. The report looks at the role of staging in home sales based on a survey of more than 1,200 NAR members.
Roughly three in 10 agents reported a bump of 1% to 10% in the prices offered for staged homes. And about half of agents said staging a home made it sell faster.
The report found that the median cost for companies’ staging services was $1,500. Home sellers paid a median of $500 when their own agents did the staging.
For insight into the local staging industry, The Inquirer spoke to Starr Osborne, who founded the Philadelphia-based company Tailored Transitions in 2004.
Osborne, who stages homes across the region, is the author of Home Staging That Works: Sell Your Home in Less Time for More Money. Her company’s services range from offering personalized recommendations so owners can stage their homes themselves to bringing in artwork, furniture, and other pieces from her warehouse to fill rooms.
“At its very core, staging is designing a house to appeal to the broadest probable target market,” Osborne said. “We work with the Realtor to say who’s your probable buyer. And then we try to design the house to appeal to them. Whereas interior design is appealing to that one client.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you approach staging a home?
We talk [sellers] through what makes the house appealing. At the very basic level, it’s cleaning, it’s fresh paint, it’s gardening.
And each remedy is specific to the house. For some people, it’s removing some garden because it looks too labor intensive and too busy. If someone’s lived in a house a long time, it’s as much about removing things as it is adding things.
We can go through and make a report for someone who’s lived in a house 30 years about getting rid of some antiques, and the Oriental [rugs] need to come up, and we can bring in light-colored, contemporary rugs. And that can transform a room.
Sometimes they have an empty space like in the basement, and we put down a really cool rug and a yoga mat and an exercise ball, and that kind of gives you a sense, “Oh, this could be our workout room.”
We created a playroom on the third floor of a house in West Mount Airy once, and the Realtor was like, “I knew they were gonna bid when their 2-year-old was playing on the floor with the toys you’d put out.” And it’s like, ”Oh, we can see Johnny here.” We’re trying to create that connection.
Do you adjust your approach depending on the home?
The way we would stage, you know, a cute little rowhouse in Old City that’s very vertical with lots of steps — it’s probably going to be a younger family. It’s very different than the way we may stage a big, old, stone house in Gladwyne that might be a different target market.
It really is looking at the marketing of the house and working hand in glove with the Realtors, who ideally are giving us all kinds of good market information.
What makes a staging successful?
That there’s nothing too personal in the house. The goal is to have a [buyer] walk in and imagine their kids playing in the yard or them working in the office or whatever their lifestyle is. You want to have them imagine themselves in the house. So anything that takes them out of that aspirational fantasy moment is negative.
And that goes for stuff that’s too specific. You know, your collection of World War II guns.
Think of the house as a frame in which you’re going to paint a picture of your life. You want to keep it really simple, so they can create the canvas. And you want a little bit of energy, a little bit of fun, but not too much.
As people are more and more watching HGTV, people are expecting really well presented, staged houses. And if your house isn’t that and you still have the plaid couch or your kids’ toys are in the corner, it’s a real negative. People are much less forgiving, because their visual world is so massaged all the time now.
And, you know, people do work with virtual staging and that can be great until you actually go see it. If it’s not the way it was presented in the pictures, then it’s jarring.
How does staging make a difference?
You have one chance to come on the market and be in the offensive position. And then you’re sort of playing defense, like with the days on market.
Some people will say, “Well, if it doesn’t sell, we’ll stage in a month.” That is just so counterproductive, because you’ve already marketed it sort of mediocrely, probably. And you’ve got to give the Realtor the best tools.
We see our houses selling faster. We rarely go beyond a 30-day [period until] contract from start to finish, and that’s even including inspections. So usually, they sell fast and sell strong. At the high and the low end of the market.
What are misconceptions people have about staging?
People think home staging is us rolling a truck up and filling a whole empty house — like a new build — with furniture. And, granted, we do that a lot. But the more nuanced piece of home staging is the marketing and packaging of a house that someone’s currently living in.
That’s a trickier proposition, harder to do really well, and harder to do well without disaffecting the owner. You gotta work with what you have. It’s like solving a problem. And you’ve got to be able to articulate, “This isn’t any indictment of your taste, but we gotta give the buyer what they may want, and this is what we are seeing they want.”
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