Des Moines Business Record
11-26-06
Home staging grows as housing market slows
By Sharon Baltes
sharonbaltes@bpcdm.com
Though the slowing housing market is bad news for prospective home sellers,
real estate agents and the construction industry, it's actually resulting in
increased business for a handful of people in Greater Des Moines.
Local businesses such as Roomscapes that specialize in "staging" homes for
sale are reporting more demand for their services. Home staging is "dressing up"
or marketing a home to help it make a good impression on potential buyers. It
often involves rearranging furniture and artwork, removing distracting personal
items and incorporating a few new pieces into the decor.
"The way I live and the way I show my house are different," said Sharon Hatten,
owner of Roomscapes. "Things that you have in the house for your own comfort,
you might have to re-evaluate when it's time to sell."
According to a 2006 survey from StagedHomes.com, homes listed for sale
without staging spent an average of four and a half months on the market, while
homes staged before listing spent less than one and a half months on the
market. Costs for staging vary widely depending on where you live. On the West
Coast, professional stagers charge upwards of $200 per hour, but in Greater Des
Moines, the rate tends to be $50 to $65 an hour.
"Staging is worth the upfront cost if it gets you an offer sooner," said Jennifer
Gruber, an agent with Iowa Realty's Jordan Creek office. Gruber hires a local
company called Artistic Attitude to stage her home listings.
With a growing inventory of homes on the market, Gruber thinks staging has
never been more important. According to the Des Moines Area Association of
Realtors' residential real estate data from October, there were 6,980 active
listings on the market, up from 5,937 a year ago. There were 825 homes sold in
October, 80 fewer than a year earlier.
"With so many properties on the market, if the buyer coming through doesn't
have a good immediate reaction to your home in the first minute, they'll move on
because they have plenty more homes to look at," Gruber said.
Hatten, who started her business in 2001, said awareness about staging homes
has been growing over the past couple of years in Greater Des Moines. Five
years ago, she spent most of her time educating real estate agents and
homeowners about the process of home staging and supplemented her business
with home presentation services for people who weren't planning to sell but
wanted to restyle rooms in their houses. Now, she gets many inquiries about
home staging, and this service has grown to about 75 percent of her business.
Home stagers begin assessing a home before they even walk inside.
Approaching the house from across the street, they take note of things such as
the quality of the landscaping, outdoor clutter and the condition of the paint on
the front door.
Inside, they go through the home using a "buyer's eyes," looking for common
problems such as loose caulk in the bathrooms, curling wallpaper, chipped paint,
cluttered closets, an abundance of family photographs and a large number of
collectibles. The goal is to suggest improvements, remove clutter, make rooms
appear larger with proper furniture placement and de-personalize the home so
that potential buyers can picture themselves living there.
"You would be surprised at how some people don't see beyond the things you
have in your home," Hatten said. "Sometimes people will remember that
collection of beer steins you had in the family room, but not the great fireplace
they saw there."
She also suggests that clients remove items that reflect their sporting team
preferences, especially if there's a lot of University of Iowa or Iowa State
University paraphernalia.
"Some people might walk away because they're not a fan of your team," Hatten
said. "You want to eliminate those things that could be a deterrent."
Hatten has a warehouse of home accessories such as area rugs, artificial plants
and artwork that she loans out to her customers to carry out her "visual
packaging" of the house. Other home stagers such as Artistic Attitude, Feather
Your Nest Interiors and Cerise de Mai work with items already in the house and
purchase small accent pieces when necessary.
Iowa Realty's Gruber agrees that people are quick to make judgments on a home
based on how it's decorated. When she takes prospective buyers through
houses, they often have a stronger reaction to things such as colors and
furnishings than the overall size of a room.
"I'm amazed when I go through homes with buyers," Gruber said. "Sometimes I
stop and ask them if it's really the house they like or the furniture, because the
house may be smaller than what they told me they were looking for."
A year into Gruber's three-year career in residential real estate, she started hiring
Peg Bray and Char Oldt from Artistic Attitude to stage the homes she lists before
they go on the market. She says it improves the chances that her homes make a
good impression on potential buyers. Gruber pays for one hour of consultation
services for her clients.
Gruber is not the only real estate agent buying into the idea of home staging.
Myrna Anderson, an agent with Hunziker & Associates Realtors, offers
complementary home staging services to all her listings. Anderson, who works
full time as director of the Kirkendall Public Library in Ankeny, also owns Feather
Your Nest Interiors.
Anderson said the homes she lists typically sell within six to eight weeks.
According to the DMAAR market statistics from October, the average home
spent 11 weeks on the market.
With these market conditions, Hatten said staging a home isn't enough on its own
to lead to a "slam dunk." She said the process of selling a home needs to be a
collaboration among the stager, the homeowner and the real estate agent.
"The homeowner has to keep up what I put in place and the Realtor needs to
price the house right, but I think staging stacks the odds in your favor," Hatten
said.