Your home is your castle. But when you’re selling, you should think of it as a stage.
So say Constance Bennett and Janie Raymond, two Sonoma Valley women who each have a home-staging business. They’re professionals who get paid to primp a person’s pad in hopes of improving the prospect of it selling.
If you’ve got a vacant house, they’ll fill it with furniture. If you live there, they’ll rearrange your furniture to improve the traffic “flow” and add in a few pieces of their own stuff. If you’ve got knick-knacks or other clutter, these professional home stagers will talk you into having it boxed up and stashed out of sight. (Because you’re moving anyway, right?)
Between them, they’ve staged everything from mobile homes to multi-million dollar mansions. Their prices range from a few hundred dollars for a consultation to several thousand dollars to fill a big home with furniture.
That may sound pricey. But with so much money riding on a sale in today’s housing market, Bennett and Raymond swear that staging pays for itself.
“It really works,” said Bennett, a longtime interior designer who now mainly does home staging. “It’s going to sell faster and for more money, probably. It pays for itself, there’s no doubt about it.”
Bennett staged her first home in 1987 (“Before staging had a name,” she said) when a real-estate agent friend asked Bennett to help fix up a widower’s house in the Cupertino foothills that suffered from such things as avocado-green carpeting. It sat on the market for six months without an offer.
“They never got a nibble,” Bennett said.
But after she added area rugs and made other improvements, “It sold in a really bad market. Sold the first day.”
Recently, Bennett staged a vacant live/work loft on First Street West in Sonoma.
Despite a soaring ceiling, the unit’s floorspace is small.
“It’s basically one room,” Bennett said as she surveyed the empty unit. “I’ll show the buyer how to live here ... try to show livability.”
Bennett chose a queen-sized bed for the upstairs bedroom and modern-looking furniture to fit with the loft’s interior.
She said a room with furniture in it actually can look bigger than an empty room.
To fill a space, Bennett has three storage units filled with furniture to choose from and two men to help her move it around.
“I carry my own inventory,” she said. “I have about five homes’ worth. It’s a big overhead.”
Janie Raymond, who owns Plain Jane’s Consignment Store, fell in love with home-staging after she had her own home staged.
Raymond said that organizing and getting rid of clutter is a big part of staging.
In fact, that’s one of the things Raymond’s stager did for her.
“I thought, ‘I would love to live like this all the time,’” she said.
Raymond became an accredited home-staging professional by taking a course from the International Association of Home Staging Professionals that was founded four years ago by Barb Schwarz.
Staging can range from a simple “to do” list for the sellers, to a major clean-up and redesign of the home and its furnishings, Raymond said.
Sometimes, a real estate agent and a stager will recommend that the seller “spend money to make money” and do a “mini-remodel,” Bennett said.
“By investing just a few thousand dollars, a mini-remodel can bring a seller’s home out of a two-, three- or four-decade time-warp and into the present,” she explains in a flyer.
“These changes might be as simple as paint and carpet. Taking the process one layer deeper, however, to replace dated light fixtures, bathroom and kitchen faucets, medicine cabinets and mirrors, and towel bars can make a really huge impact for a relatively small expenditure.”
While home staging is nothing new in places such as Marin and San Francisco, it’s still a little unusual in Sonoma, Bennett and Raymond said.
“Sonoma is just now catching on,” Raymond said.
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Constance Bennett, of Staging Solutions, was hired to stage a live-work loft on First Street West in Sonoma. She put a queen-sized bed (above) in the loft’s upstairs living space.
The addition of bar chairs, a coffee table, and a small chair and side-table, turn what was once a deserted space into something homey and comfortable.
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