USA TODAY ARTICLE

Excerpts from USA Today Article
Staging results in faster sale, richer price

By Noelle Knox, USA TODAY
Fran Freedman took down the family photos and most of her artwork. She had the fence in the front yard ripped out, and she got rid of half the clothes in her closet. And that was just for starters. She wasn't redecorating. Rather, she was "staging" her house for a potential home buyer.With 3.75 million homes on the market — a 7.3-month supply — sellers must work harder these days to attract buyers. Yet oddly enough, the trick to making your home stand out is often to make both the interior and exterior look generic, almost bland. And that's where home staging comes in.
"The philosophy is the buyer must be able to picture themselves living in your home," says Freedman, 65, a lawyer in Philadelphia. "They don't want to see your family photos and your artwork. The décor should be understated so they can say, 'This would be the perfect place for my...' "
Does it work? When Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Los Altos, Calif., looked at nearly 2,800 properties in eight U.S. cities in 2004, they found that the staged homes, on average, sold in half the time that the non-staged homes did. The sellers with staged homes ended up with 6.3% more than their asking price, on average, while sellers with non-staged homes sold for 1.6% more than the asking price.
The cost of hiring a company to stage your home tends to range from $1,800 to $3,800 but can go much higher, depending on the size of the house and the amount of work involved.
Freedman says Tailored Transitions, the company she used, "had a hard time convincing me and my husband to spend the money. People don't spend money on this kind of thing. I'd never heard of staging."
In the end, they spent $2,500 for the interior, $4,000 for the exterior, $500 to rent "props" like less eye-catching artwork and decorative pillows and $500 to move their excess furniture and boxes into storage. In hindsight, she says, it was worth every dime.
They listed their home this month for $949,000, and Freedman says, "I don't know if we would have priced it that high when it wasn't so attractive."
Judee von Seldeneck put her staged home in Philadelphia on the market this month; it sold in one day, for $700,000.
From moving shrubs to planting flowers, to replacing the knobs on kitchen cabinets and ripping up the carpet on the stairs, every change was made to accentuate the house's best features. There were even pumpkins on the porch to lend a homey, inviting look.
Inside, the stagers "put furniture that looked comfortable but not too heavy, not cluttered," says von Seldeneck, CEO of an executive search firm, who's "in my 60s." The books on shelves, colors of the rug, the furniture — all were "geared more toward younger people."
She spent $8,000 on the job and says, "It was the best money I ever spent."
The de-cluttering process is "one of the biggest challenges we find," she says. "Sellers feel it's an indictment of the way they live. You have to remember what you're selling. You're not selling your taste; you're selling tastes the buyer wants to see."
Freedman recalls it was "kind of traumatic" when all her family photos were packed away. Another tough moment was when she stood in front of her closet, wondering what she could throw out.
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