Sellers Turn to Home Stagers To Gain Edge in Housing Market

Kristine Jegi is standing in a 10-by-10 storage unit just across the Manhattan Bridge surrounded by silk tulips, orchids, ferns, mirrors, both beveled and modern, and even a candelabra. Wearing a tweed coat and jeans, Ms. Jegi asks a helper to carry crib parts around the corner to the loading dock, where a van is being loaded for an early-morning delivery the next day.

Ms. Jegi isn't moving. She's prepping for a home staging in a 2,800-square-foot loft on Fulton Street.

With increased competition in the residential sales market, more and more sellers are turning to home stagers to spruce up their units before they put them up for sale. Stagers, as they are informally known, make over apartments to entice buyers who may otherwise pass. The idea is to enhance the property's selling points to fuel a quick, emotion-driven sale.

Like model units in brand-new buildings, the best-staged apartments replicate the buyer's lifestyle and sensibilities, creating the margins of a home before negotiations over financials and fixtures begin.

But more than simply crafting models, staging — a cross between merchandising and marketing — is a concentrated effort to direct a buyer's eyes to the views, the extra square footage, and the sculptured ceiling, and to anticipate the buyer's demographic.

"Is it a start-up family, is it a Wall Street couple, is it a Wall Street individual? Is it a mature family, a pied-à-terre for an older couple? And sometimes the brokers will say, ‘I expect to have all those people coming through,'" the founder of From Drab to Fab, a real estate staging company, Sid Pinkerton, said.

Staging fees vary, from $500 for an initial consultation to $15,000 for furniture rentals and accessory and staging costs. Putting money up front could translate into a faster sale, an offer that meets the seller's asking price, or even a higher one.

Mr. Pinkerton worked on a classic seven apartment that an elderly couple had lived in for 40 years. "It was tiresome looking," he said. "So we repainted the walls, redid the floors, bought some accessories and new lighting fixtures, and buyers thought, ‘Whoa, this is a gut renovation!'" The apartment sold for a few hundred thousand dollars more than the original asking price, he said.

"I'm finding that there's a sweet spot in terms of the return on the staging investment," Mr. Pinkerton, who staged about 200 apartments last year, mostly from broker referrals, said. "Generally, anything over $1.5 million is where you get the largest return. For staging, you want every dollar to get $10 or $50 or $100 back."

But staging isn't limited to higher-end sales. A $400,000 studio can benefit from a paint job, a reduction in clutter, and some arty prints, stagers say.

"The time factor can be huge. If something's on the market and sits there, you've got to lower your price. In getting something to trade quickly, you can hold your price stronger," a senior vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, Ed Hardesty, said.

Mr. Hardesty estimates that between 30% and 40% of apartments Prudential sells are staged. He admits, though, that it can be hard to convince sellers to spend $5,000 buying furniture.

Staging began on the West Coast more than 30 years ago, but didn't catch on in New York City until last year when the residential sales market started to change, experts say. Of course, some apartments don't need staging and, since brokers are reluctant to offend sellers, they usually are loath to suggest it. One broker, though, brings up staging immediately.

"You have to be delicate as a broker when you're going for the pitch," one Manhattan broker, who requested anonymity, said. "You can't say, ‘Your apartment looks terrible.' You can't do that. You don't want to be insulting. So I've incorporated it into the pitch for every sale that I go into."

The owner of the Fulton Street loft, Pat Merchant, said staging will help sell her large, now-empty investment property in a shaky market. "If someone walks in, they could say, ‘Wait, where's the dining room and where am I going to put the TV?'" she said. "It helps people come to decisions. Having it nicely pulled together with beautiful flowers and a gorgeous bed helps to make it more emotional."

Ms. Jegi, who runs New York Home Staging Solutions with her mother, is adding tall trees to Ms. Merchant's loft with to emphasize the ceiling height, and neutral colors to match the landscape. The silk florals from storage are stacked on a kitchen counter, and the vases are just around the corner.

Another seller, a Manhattan architect-developer of mostly residential properties who asked not to be named, likened staging to retail displays that thrive on the power of suggestion. "It's like when you see a mannequin at Gap: Kids all dressed with the right shoes, the right sweater, the right this, and the parents don't even have to think. That's what I try to do."