Sellers, stage your home for fun and profit.

Sellers, stage your home for fun and profit.

If you've ever walked into an open house and said, "Wow, no one lives like this, but I'd sure like to!", you've probably walked into a staged home. (Or you know some really wealthy people with really good taste.)

Home staging is window dressing in the best sense. Stores "dress" their display windows with an idealized picture of how their merchandise can be used. Window dressing is fantasy that sells hard, not only because it demonstrates the product, but because fantasy itself is a powerful sales tool.

Home stagers also use fantasy to help you sell your house. They bring in the latest furniture and accessories and arrange it to present your home in its best light. Cost varies widely, depending on the home and the stager, but figure about $2000 for design and set-up, and maybe $800 a month for furniture rental for the average-sized home.

Sound a little frou-frou? Believe me, even jus'-plain-folks sellers will find that staging is some of the best money they've ever spent. Because this stuff just works. Because staging, like all good marketing, sells on more than one level.

Most of us have home furnishings a few design cycles behind from the latest look. Or maybe the latest look was never our goal. Or maybe we're still happy with the stuff we dragged out of Mom and Dad's garage. Serviceable stuff, maybe even great stuff, but not the stuff your buyers' dreams are made of. That's where stagers come in.

Emotion drives the decision-making of every buyer. Buyers must fall in love with a home before they'll make their best offer. A home with the seller's furnishings and too much of it or, just as unappealing, bare rooms, doesn't move them.

A good stager does more than just fill those rooms with trendy furniture and artsy accessories. A good stager knows your home's buyers and their tastes. She gives them what they need to feel at home: a home that looks like their own, or at least like their own fantasy home. Young or established, hip or elegant, casual or sophisticated.

Still sound a little out there? Then how about this? Most buyers have a hard time visualizing how to use your home's space. Left to their own imagination, buyers won't see the best way to arrange your living room, or realize that your kitchen can accommodate a good-sized table. Staging not only paints them a fantasy, it draws them a diagram.

What separates the handful of great stagers from the rest? Great staging invites you to linger and enjoy, yet subtly moves you from room to room. The arrangements have a rhythm, a subdued yet visceral excitement that my wife calls "eye pop". It's hard-working, hard-selling commercial art with your home as its canvas.

It's fun to see what a great stager can do for your home. It's even more fun to see the great offers that great staging brings.