Staging Your House

In parts of California, the latest trend in open houses is to hire professional actors to impersonate home sellers during the open house. For example, in one new housing development an attractive, friendly "couple” in their mid-30s padded around the model home with their well-behaved children and invited would-be buyers in to take a look. The slim, blonde "wife” made cookies in the kitchen and offered them to guests while the "husband” cheerfully showed buyers around. The "kids” — also actors — played a board game quietly and happily in the living room.

Is this reality? Of course not. But neither is an open house and that’s what you need to remember when you hold yours. If you think opening your home for the afternoon to would-be buyers means hiding the kids’ toys and vacuuming the day before, keep reading. Dressing homes for success before their debut day on the market has not only become de rigueur but it has spawned a booming industry that even has a trademarked name. It’s called "staging,” and if you think of it a little like getting a stage ready for a theater performance or the television crew, you’re not far off.

Seducing the Buyer

The idea is to set the "stage” for would-be buyers to imagine themselves happily living in your home. Fortunately, hiring actors to impersonate sellers has not yet become a widespread trend in open houses. But, setting the stage to sell your home does indeed mean that your home must be attractive and appealing even beyond being clean and in excellent repair. In short, your home needs to seduce.

If you’d rather leave the details of the makeover to someone else, you can always hire a professional home stager. A professional stager may charge anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a thousand or more, depending on the size of your home, the amount of work the stager will do, and the numbers of "props” such as flowers, potted plants, etc., that the stager buys for your home. Professional stagers are easily contacted through real estate offices and Web sites. With a little effort and a lot of attention to detail, you can also do it yourself.

Staging Tips From the Pros

De-clutter one more time. Think of it as a second, more thorough editing. When you removed clutter and personal items the first time around, you probably weren’t hard-nosed enough.

Get serious with the closets. Staging pros suggest removing about half the clothes from your closets, then buying new, attractive, matching hangers for all the clothes that remain. Hang the clothes all facing the same direction. Organize shoeboxes into neat stacks. In linen closets wash all the towels and sheets so that nothing smells musty, and fold them perfectly, as if they were on display at a high-end department store.
It may be worthwhile to invest in some plush new bathroom towels and an attractive new bedspread. Remember you will take these with you when you move, and if your old towels and bedspread look threadbare or faded, the message is that your home is dated or unkempt.
Make sure every window sparkles and that the drapes are all open. No one wants to live in a dark house so make sure every possible ray of light gets in. Check all the light bulbs in every single fixture to make sure they work. Replace them with brighter ones, if possible. Consider buying a good-looking floor lamp or two if you need more light in big rooms. Have every light in the house on during your open house.
If a bedroom or bathroom is really small, consider buying a wall mirror and hanging it strategically in the room. Mirrors can give the illusion that rooms are bigger than they are.
Professional stagers have lots of "beauty tips", such as replacing shabby throw pillows in the living room with new ones; turning every jar and bottle in your kitchen pantry and bathroom medicine cabinet so that the label faces toward you — this gives your pantry and medicine cabinet an orderly look; organizing books on books shelves so that books of the same height are arranged next to each other; and storing any kitchen appliances or cookware that doesn’t fit easily into a cupboard. Since people will open your kitchen cupboards, consider removing any truly ugly or dinged up cookware.

Buy an attractive arrangement of fresh cut flowers and put them in an elegant vase in the kitchen and perhaps also get some for the living room. Although the flowers don’t need to look like they came from the fanciest florist in town, neither should they look like you plucked them off a grave. If you really don’t trust your own taste in flower arrangements, buy several bunches of the same kind of flowers in the same color and put them all together in one vase. Although the carnation, for instance, is often derided as a humble grocery-store posy, if you put 50 or 60 of them in a vase, they are as elegant as a bouquet of long-stemmed roses.
Make sure your home smells good. Now that you’ve ridden it of any animal, smoke, or cooking smells, throw open the windows for a while. Though some real estate agents still tell home sellers to bake cookies or pies just before an open house, any odor — even baking cookies — will make some visitors wonder what you’re trying to hide.
Make a scrapbook about your home. It doesn’t need to be cute. Just a notebook with a little history about the home and a short list of home improvements and when they were made. Would-be buyers are always interested in knowing about utilities, so add a few months’ worth of utility bills. In addition, you may want to make a one-page sheet of information for visitors to take with them. The info sheet should include a nice photo of the house, all the usual price and contact information, and information about the locations of neighborhood schools, parks, shopping centers, transit lines, libraries, and anything else you can think of that makes your neighborhood desirable.

All ready for your visitors? It never hurts to take one, last, very careful look.
Leave the house. This is important. Many buyers find it weird to encounter the seller when they go to an open house. They will hesitate to look in rooms and closets and will leave quickly, never a good sign. If you’re selling it yourself without an agent try not to hover and don’t follow visitors from room to room.

Real Life Example …

Who: Home seller on a last tour of a rental home she was selling
The quote: "I power washed the house, cleaned the gutters, cleaned the roof, cleaned the driveway, put beauty bark and gravel around the house, painted one room, and that was it. I came by one last time to mow and found a dead rat on the workbench in the garage and an agent coming up the driveway. I flung the rat into my neighbor's yard and then went back later to retrieve it.”
The outcome: The house sold quickly, thanks to a red-hot market. And, no doubt, thanks to the fact that the buyer didn’t encounter the dead rat!

Related links: Clean It Up Before Selling; Navigating Open Houses for the Buyer; Showing Your Home