House Staging – Does It Help Sell Your House Faster

CHICAGO (AP) – April 22, 2010 – Hiring a decorating and marketing specialist to help sell a house might sound like a frivolous cost to homeowners desperate to salvage every dollar in a fallen market.

Hiring someone to decorate your home will always sound frivolous to certain homeowners. But it really can be too much to take for anyone looking to sell a home in an already depressed market.

Staging Your Home Can Help Sell It Faster

A quality house at a fair price will sell itself, they figure. Paying a professional stager to rearrange or bring in new furniture, paint the walls neutral colors and hang different pictures surely couldn’t be worth a four-figure fee, the thinking goes.

Or could it?

Real estate professionals insist staging makes a big difference in how quickly a home sells, which can mean a higher sale price, and cite their own figures that show it.

Patrick McLaughlin had such a poor impression of a vacant house he visited at an open house on Long Island that he told his broker friend it would never sell – it felt cold and uninviting. Then he went back after a professional had staged it and ended up buying it.

“They had art work, furniture, sofas, rugs. It added a great deal of warmth to the property,” says McLaughlin, himself a broker in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

More sellers have been turning to staging to make their properties stand out in a market packed with competing houses.

Margaret Gehr, who stages homes in the Chicago suburbs through her business Re-Arrange It Interiors, and her staff staged a home for The Associated Press’ Homeownership Week series. She discussed the growing practice in an interview:

Q: What exactly is home staging?