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Dressed to Sell

Home Staging Hits the Island

When Lisa Steele decided to sell her Victoria Bay house in 2004, her instincts told her she needed help making it look as appealing as possible.
    Steele was in the middle of a divorce and had moved out half the furniture. But she wanted her house sold quickly so that she and her kids could be in a new house for the new school year.
    To hurry up the selling process, she turned to a home stager to bring in furniture and decorative touches and spruce up her house to increase its appeal to potential buyers. “I had never worked with a stager or designer before. I was basically letting her have free rein,” Steele says. “She came in, took a look at the house and within a week transformed it. I was able to relax and know that it was going to look perfect for when people walked in.”
    The stager with whom Steele worked, Joanne Connell of Alameda-based Revisions, used what was there, brought in decorative touches like artwork and accessories and arranged for light landscaping. All told, Steele spent about $3,000. But it was worth it, says Steele, whose house sold quickly—even while other lagoon houses “were still sitting on the market.”
    Getting a home ready to sell often involves more than just hiring a real estate agent and throwing open the doors. In Alameda, savvy real estate agents and homesellers are increasingly turning to home staging to help them enliven their homes and create an image that will reel in buyers. The tactic can produce quicker sales, more offers and a higher selling price.
    “Sellers have come to realize that the days of just hiring an agent and putting up a ‘For Sale’ sign are over,” says Connell. “In order to maximize the selling price and sell [the house] quickly, you need to do everything you can to create a good first impression.
    “Staging is a methodology of preparing a home for sale,” she says. “If sellers have a lot of family pictures around, I recommend that they take a good 95 percent of them away. You want to allow other people to see themselves in the house, not get the personality of the person who’s living there.”
    Connell removes clutter and encourages sellers to evaluate paint and carpet conditions honestly. “A lot of times, people have lived there so many years that they don’t even notice [the flaws] anymore.”
    “When you get ready to put your house on the market, you want it to compete,” adds Sophie Azouaou, whose staging business, SophiSticate Interiors, is in Alameda. “It’s a product,” she explains. “It must be priced right, and it must look better than the other [houses on the market].”

A Growing Trend

    While the practice of staging is widespread in the Bay Area, it’s a fairly recent Alameda phenomenon. “In the last year, interest has really perked up,” Connell says. “It probably goes hand in hand with the escalation of prices—market value in Alameda seems to have gone through the roof in the past year. People are realizing that if their house looks good, they’re going to get more money.”
    Maureen Shandobil, a real estate agent with Harbor Bay Realty, echoes Connell’s observations. “Sellers bring up [staging] a lot now,” she says. She credits television shows like “Curb Appeal” with helping raise awareness of the value of staging to make a house as attractive as possible to potential buyers.
      Shandobil says home staging seems popular with people who have recently bought or sold a home and with “move-up” buyers who are trading up for larger dwellings. “If they’ve been out looking at houses, they’re more familiar with [the concept of staging].
     “Smart sellers have always done things to make their house look nice,” she adds. “But now, sellers are anticipating that they’ll get multiple offers, so they want to maximize the impact of their house.” The goal is to create an emotional attachment so that buyers fall in love with the house and end up bidding against each other, she explains.
    Unlike home decorating where the goal is to reflect the owner’s taste, the whole point of staging is to depersonalize a house so that “it could be anyone’s house,” says Azouaou. “You want prospective buyers to imagine that it’s their house.”
    It’s all about pleasing as many people as possible, says Marlene Wharmby, who stages homes in Oakland and Alameda. She searches for universally appealing elements, which translate, for starters, into neutral furnishings and plants. She wants prospective buyers to remember the house, rather than the furnishings. The whole point of staging, Wharmby says, is to show off the house’s potential—and create a strong emotional appeal for buyers.
    In some cases, beautifying a house can be as simple as straightening up or adding a few accessories. Shandobil encourages clients to remove refrigerator magnets, put away toys and add new plants to the front yard. In addition, she often brings in candles, bathroom linens, pillows and plants, spending about $500 on accessories. About a third of the time, she says, she suggests a professional stager.
    Real estate agents who check out the homes Shandobil lists often ask whether the properties have been staged. “If a house looks beautiful, they assume it’s staged,” she says. “Staging increases the buzz and desirability of a property,” because the house itself looks more attractive to buyers, making it more appealing for agents to show to their clients.
    Many local real estate brokers consider home staging a value-added service that they can offer themselves rather than suggesting an independent third party. “I don’t know that staging has come to its full maturity in Alameda yet,” says Patricia Gomillia, a real estate agent with Gallagher and Lindsay. Gomillia, who also stages homes for sale, estimates that about one in five houses entering the Alameda market is staged.
    “Sellers don’t often understand that if they are willing to put a little more money in up front, it reaps a higher return at the end,” she says. “If you have a two-bedroom, one-bath house, it’s difficult to convince the seller that they should invest $2,500 to get a higher return. That’s where the Realtor comes in. They really understand what the return will be.”
    Gomillia stages houses for her clients and other agents’ clients. “There’s always something that can be done to improve [a house],” she says. She brings in accessories, pictures and accent furnishings from pieces she’s amassed over the years and stores in a warehouse. Specific items are tailored to the style of the house she stages.
    “As a Realtor, I will usually offer the services at no charge,” Gomillia says. However, the seller pays for any outside services like painting or landscaping, she says.
    Dania Alvarez-Marroni, a real estate agent with Harbor Bay Realty, is accredited by the International Association of Home Staging Professionals. She works frequently with Azouaou, another accredited stager who’s head of the association’s local chapter, and will pay Azouaou’s consultation fee for suggestions. However, sellers pay for additional staging services.

Small Touches

    “There are a lot of simple things people can do that help them get the most value out of their homes,” Alvarez-Marroni says, suggesting removing clutter and professionally cleaning windows as starters. Small touches— opening curtains, making a house brighter and more inviting, turning on music—can create ambience to put lookers in a buying mood, Azouaou says. Shandobil says to pack away paperback books and spread vases among the bookcases of hardbacks for a more pleasing presentation.
    Some cases require more drastic measures. Last summer, Wharmby staged a Victorian house on Clinton Avenue that was cluttered with toys and sports memorabilia, which she insisted go into storage. She added Victorian antiques and lots of pillows to allow the character of the house to shine.
    And Azouaou directed the out-of-town owner of a McSherry home to landscape, re-paint, de-clutter and deep-clean. She also updated bathrooms with new shower curtains, fresh towels and bath rugs; rearranged furniture; removed personal pictures; and brought in plants, flowers and accessories. The house sold $31,000 over the asking price.

A Wise Investment

    Many real estate agents offer free staging advice and services to clients. But extensive staging—bringing in a lot of accessories or furniture, for instance— can cost between $1,500 and $4,000.
    Lois Singley says the $3,000 she spent on staging in 2002 was well worth it. As executor of her parents’ estate, she faced selling a house that hadn’t been on the market in 50 years. When Singley’s real estate agent recommended she work with Gomillia to ready the house, Singley wasn’t sure what to expect.
    “Patricia helped pare things down,” she says. Gomillia suggested removing old carpet, refinishing the hardwood floors, installing new linoleum floors in the kitchen and painting the home’s interior. She rearranged the furniture and added pieces and accessories to complete the transformation.
    “Within four weeks, the house was sold,” she says. “We were very, very pleased.” Singley has since recommended staging to another friend who found herself in a similar situation.

Finding a Stager

    As staging has grown in popularity, it’s gotten its own professional association, the International Association of Home Staging Professionals. Based in Concord, the group offers training and accreditation to home stagers. To find a local accredited stager, visit www.stagedhomes.com and click on “ASP Directory.”
    However, while some stagers are accredited through the association, many others are interior designers or real estate agents who have simply expanded into the specialty based on demand. Some real estate agents offer staging services themselves; others can provide referrals to local stagers experienced with preparing Alameda homes for sale.
    Going to open houses and picking up cards or flyers is another a good way to get names of local stagers. Many stagers will leave their cards on display; if not, a quick call to the listing agent should yield the information.