Open Houses

Will a Home Stager Help You Sell Your House?

Not exactly a decorator, not exactly a real estate agent, a home stager might be exactly what you need.

Home stagers claim they can help you sell faster and for more money. Flickr/Creative Commons

January 7, 2015

3 minutes to read

Your stuff is not as nice as you think it is.

That’s the general gist of the message Mary O’Grady needs to get across to homeowners trying to get their houses ready to go on the market. “If you’ve been in your house more than five years, you have too much stuff,’’ she said.

O’Grady is a home stager, working mostly in Boston suburbs like Newton and Wellesley. She helps people present their homes to potential buyers in the best possible light, a job she says consists of “mostly editing.’’

Home staging has become an increasingly popular step in the home-selling process over the past several years. Barb Schwarz, founder of StagedHomes.com, credits herself with inventing the idea of home staging on the west coast in the early 1970s. She now runs an international network of Accredited Staging Professionals (of which O’Grady is a member). A search for ASPs in Massachusetts turns up 155 results.

Whether you’ve never heard of home staging or it’s all the rage in your neighborhood, here’s what you need to know if you’re trying to sell a house.

What do home stagers do?

O’Grady is typical of most home stagers in that she offers a range of services. The most basic is a consultation, which her website says takes 2 to 3 hours and costs $250 for the average-sized house.

O’Grady walks through the home looking for opportunities to redesign or otherwise improve the look of the space. “I go in with the eye of a buyer,’’ she said. “Is it too cluttered? Am I so distracted that I can’t see the space? It’s the space you’re buying, not the stuff.’’

At the end of a consultation, O’Grady hands to the homeowner a detailed set of notes, which she says is enough of a guide for most people to get their homes in order on their own. But for a price, O’Grady will do that redecorating work herself.

For a higher price, like many stagers, she’ll bring in furniture and accessories, either from a rental warehouse or her own collection. The rental option tends to be for people who have a home full of idiosyncratic or highly stylized stuff, which is not good for showing a house.

“I tend to do fairly neutral,’’ said O’Grady. She doesn’t like to bring in a whole room full of modern furniture, for example, but prefers to mix and match. “Most people don’t have a specific look, they have a piece of this or a piece of that,’’ so it’s easier for people to imagine their own furniture in the space.

Do I really need one?

“90 percent of the homes I stage sell after the First Open House’’ is the signature at the bottom of Mary O’Grady’s emails, and she stresses that potential buyers make a decision within 30 seconds of walking into a house. StagedHomes.com claims the houses worked on by its professionals sell quicker and for more money than other homes.

Professional stagers would have you believe their services are the one indispensible key to selling your house, but the reality is less stark than that. A clean, clutter-free house certainly convinces buyers you have taken good care of the structure. Having a professional stager on call might help you create the perfect look, but the basic principles of simple, neutral decoration are available to everyone.

“It’s definitely beneficial,’’ said Briggs Johnson, a local real estate agent with Coldwell Banker and a photographer, but “it’s not a ‘must-have’ for all properties. Some properties can sell themselves.’’

Briggs finds stagers are particularly helpful for new construction or for open floor plans. O’Grady insists any house can benefit from staging, but admits, “It’s the medium [price] range that gets the most benefit.’’

“In a bad market it makes your house stand out. In a good market, you are always being compared to the people around you, so if you can make yours the best, people connect with you,’’ she said.

Both Briggs and O’Grady agreed that appealing photographs, however you prepare for them, are the most important part of selling your home. Most people do the first stages of home buying online and won’t even bother going to see a house if the photos don’t grab them.

If you’re looking to hire a stager, either for photo prep or to set up for an open house, the Boston chapter of the International Association of Home Staging Professionals is a good place to start.