Dressed to Sell

By DIANE WEDNER

April 23, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Arlene Roach has faced down pink carpet and floral wallpaper. She’s conquered clutter and vanquished vinyl. But nothing prepared her for the window valences festooned with large red bows and furry fringe that she encountered recently at a San Gabriel house for sale.

“We don’t want potential buyers to zoom in on those,” said Roach, one of a growing number of experts who “stage”--or dress up--houses for sale. “We need to bring out the strengths of the property.”

So like a fairy godmother preparing Cinderella for the ball, Roach, general manager of America’s Home Tenders in Glendale, strategically placed artwork away from the offending fabric, brought in some furniture and warmed the kitchen counter with flowers. One week later, the ordinary house that had sat unnoticed for months attracted a buyer.

“We create miracles,” said Brentwood stager Ginger Atherton, owner of Model Homes Interiors. “I take dark, dingy, worn and tired homes and turn them into a luxurious lifestyle. That’s what I really do, create a lifestyle.”

All over Southern California, sellers are plunking down anywhere from $600 to $50,000 for stagers--decorators and real estate agents--to create just the right ambience to fetch top dollar for their homes.

Whether in modest tract houses or grand estates, stagers are transforming aging, cluttered, tasteless properties into lavish living spaces.

To create their magic, stagers bring in a fleet of painters, landscape artists and floor refinishers who scrape cottage cheese off ceilings, position ferns and fountains and polish old oak floors. Lighting is placed just so to evoke an emotional response from potential buyers.

Although staging, also known as house dressing or propping, is not a new phenomenon--local professionals say the practice began about seven or eight year ago--it has become de rigueur among newly wealthy home sellers, who often are able to move up before the old house sells. Some stagers and real estate agents say that properties left vacant send out the wrong message.

“An empty house gives off a distressed feel, a sense that the owners want to dump the property fast,” Roach said.

Boyd Smith, a Pasadena Coldwell Banker real estate agent, agreed. “Empty houses lose their souls, have no feeling,” he said. “You need to touch buyers’ emotions. Music, flowers and tasteful furniture do that.”

Worked for One Brentwood Resident

It certainly worked for Brentwood resident Wendy Meepos. She recently hired Pacific Palisades designer Meredith Baer to stage two Westside houses she needed to sell in a hurry. Baer rearranged furniture, brought in a few objets d’art and plants and each house sold in one day.

Baer recalled a recent staging of a Santa Monica Canyon home, where for $2,000--exclusive of her fee--she was able to paint, landscape and install new window treatments, enough of a face lift to generate a bidding war for a modest home that had created less than a sensation during its seven months on the market.

She didn’t discount the importance of strategically placing a bowl of fresh fruit in the kitchen, a common practice among stagers, who also display decorative towels and bowls of potpourri in bathrooms to add that lived-in, homey touch.

“The average buyer doesn’t have the imagination to see the house furnished,” said Baer, whose staging fees typically run from $5,000 to $15,000. “We show them how they can fit in there.”

Brentwood stager Aimee Miller, co-owner of Provenance Antiques, dipped into her $3-million inventory of furniture, rugs and artwork to transform a nondescript Spanish-style home in Toluca Lake--whose owner had it on and off the market for years--into a cowboy hacienda.

After hauling in wagon wheels, wrought iron, fountains, ferns and pots for the main house, Miller converted the guest house into a wine grotto, complete with bottles stuffed into racks along the walls.

“For $6,000, we turned a house that was thought of as choppy and unappealing into a charming home,” said Miller, whose rugs and antiques often are purchased along with the house. “The seller had an offer two hours into the brokers’ open house.”

Nothing New to Real Estate Agents

Real estate agents say staging is nothing new to them. Offering advice is just part of the job, albeit the trickiest. To them falls the touchy task of parting clients from their prized trophy collections or 200-photo gallery of family pictures.

“I’m brutally frank,” said Helen Henderson, a Landmark Realty agent in Rancho Palos Verdes, who believes staging can be as simple as clearing out the clutter. “From the first day of the listing, I walk through the house and say, ‘You may not agree with me, but pack this Lladro up and get it out of here.’ ”

Kathryn Klinger-Belton, whose Pacific Palisades house was occupied by a renter when she hired stager Atherton, was surprised at the decorator’s vision of how best to prep her house for sale.

“It was a shock to me,” she said after seeing the newly furnished $3-million estate. “It was like coming home to find your mother had cut and permed her hair: It looks great, but different.”

And it costs a pretty penny too.

Though some stagers charge a modest $600 to prep a house, several Southland home dressers charge $25,000 and up to fill empty homes with French country antiques and art from trendy galleries.

“High-end houses need very high-end stuff,” said Clara Yang, a Prudential Jon Aaroe & Associates real estate agent in Brentwood. “You don’t want to see plastic flowers.”

No chance of that with Atherton’s inventory. The decorator filled Klinger-Belton’s 9,500-square-foot mansion with $200,000 worth of merchandise, including $50,000 in Russian tea tables, French bergere chairs and an antique armoire in the living room. Added touches such as fresh orchids, marble fruit stacked atop a silver stand and champagne bottles on the polished kitchen counter contributed to the high price tag.

Atherton charged Klinger-Belton $25,000 plus a $2,500 monthly maintenance fee. She said that although her fees are high, the houses she stages often sell over the asking price, so it’s worth the expenditure. Her client agreed.

“I think the staging helped tweak the buyers’ imagination,” said Klinger-Belton, who got an offer shortly after the staging. “It was a good investment.”

Miles McCormick, a Coldwell Banker agent in Menlo Park, the place where home staging began in Northern California, said that money spent on staging is money well spent.

“For every dollar sellers put into staging, they get $4 back,” he said. “Buyers coming through the door today want to see what their house is capable of looking like.”

Not all real estate agents agree with the big-bucks approach to staging, however. Mitzi Ray, a Coldwell Banker agent in Palos Verdes, believes that expensive home staging is an unnecessary waste of sellers’ money.

“I prefer the route of advising my clients to put Swiss Coffee white on the walls next to new carpeting,” she said, adding that she thinks buyers have more imagination than they’re given credit for. “A vacant house is best. Otherwise, buyers can’t visualize their own stuff in it.”

Bill Cote of Cote Realty Group in Corona del Mar put it this way: “It’s just absurd. Why pay someone to [stage] if you can get it for free?”

Move Own Furniture Into Empty Homes

That’s where Patrick Gillespie comes into the picture. The former real estate broker, owner of Patrick Gillespie’s Showcase Property Management Services in Newport Beach, provides “on-site managers,” or subcontractors, who move their own furniture into empty homes.

The managers set up house for a monthly fee of $600 to $1,200--depending on the size and splendor of the home--which they pay to Showcase. Gillespie’s company makes sure the managers’ backgrounds and furniture are top drawer.

In exchange for maintaining the garden and pool, making minor repairs, and keeping the houses in pristine condition between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. the subcontractors get to live in million-dollar homes at bargain-basement prices.

The down side, however, is that they must agree to vacate the premises 10 days before the close of escrow and they have to pull up stakes often.

Still, “I think it’s a win-win situation,” Gillespie said.

Not so, according to Roach, the Glendale stager. She gave up her “on-site manager” business a year ago after she had to drag two subcontractors to court for failing to vacate the premises. She now concentrates on smaller, low-cost stagings that boost her clients’ prospects for selling their homes, she said, but that give her peace of mind at the end of the day.

“I sleep better now that I don’t have renters as part of my business,” she said. “I can just put music on in the houses during the day, close them up at night and go home.”

One pitfall to avoid in staging, warned June Barlow, vice president and general counsel for California Assn. of Realtors, is concealing structural cracks or other material defects with artwork or furniture.

Covering up tiny shower-tile cracks by hanging a soap caddy or planting flowers in a bare spot in the garden are acceptable, she said, but purposely hiding plumbing leaks or a cracked foundation is illegal.

Cecilia Waeschle, a Beverly Hills Realtor who subscribes to the less-is-more philosophy of staging, believes that sellers can avoid the legal hassles and excessive costs of staging by following this simple plan:

“Put Champagne in the bucket and put vanilla in the oven. That creates all the ambience you need.”

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It’s Simple to Set Your Own Stage

You don’t have to spend a fortune to stage your own house for sale. It can be as easy and inexpensive as just getting rid of the clutter.

Experts recommend that first and foremost, home sellers pack up photographs, clear desks, hide bathroom potions and hang up clothes.

“Staging is like a little black cocktail dress,” said Boyd Smith, a Pasadena Coldwell Banker Realtor. “Think ‘less is more.’ ”

Professionals also suggest these tips:

* Paint the interior of the house and the front door.

* Replace worn, stained carpeting and cracked floor tiles.

* Wash the windows.

* Arrange towels in bathroom racks and put out fresh soap.

* Leave some toys in the pool and place books on some tables so the house looks lived in.