Stager hopes buyers can picture a house as their home
The goal is to shorten the time a property is on the market while keeping sale price up
Groton — Jenifer Egan opens a few HomeGoods bags and pulls out navy-and-white decorative pillows, which match the beachy décor of the living room. She arranges the pillows on the couch, and places a tray and plant atop the coffee table, which she has just moved from the other side of the room.
One room over, Laurie Baier is energetically putting patriotic placemats and dishware on the table, just inside the door from a deck that overlooks the harbor of Groton Long Point. Her parents, Charlie and Gert Baier, observe and try to stay out of the way.
The elder Baiers, who are in their late 80s, have owned the house they use as a summer home for 22 years. But on Friday, Gert Baier laughed as she watched the rearranging and said, “I think I walked into the wrong house!”
Laurie Baier later commented, “I wish we’d lived like this all these years.”
The real estate agent for the house at 9 Atlantic Ave. is Jonathan Rodgers, who works with Egan at Randall Realty. But Egan was there doing work connected to the business she
launched in early spring, Mystic Home Staging & Redesign.
The goal of home staging is to shorten the time a home is on the market and keep the sale price up. The Baiers’ house went on the market two weeks ago and is listed at $699,000.
The first step in Egan’s process is doing a home assessment, and she uses an eight-step process to decide what the room needs and what should be removed. She then prepares and hands over a staging to-do list for each room of the house, a shopping list and the “Top Dollar Guide” from Home Staging Resource, through which she got her certification.
Egan has packages in which she can come in for zero, two, four or seven hours of staging, ranging from $200 to $800.
“The cost of professionally staging always, hands-down, is less than a price reduction,” she said.
She rents out items like pillows, towels and artwork, and the homeowner can choose to either buy the accessories or simply use them as inspiration for where and how to place their own belongings.
“I try to use what the sellers have, and then sort of edit their belongings and add accessories that will modernize the look,” Egan said.
Her goal is to get the seller to see the house more objectively.
“When you see someone else’s house with your eyes, you see something that they don’t see,” Gert Baier said. Her example is what happened when Egan asked her to remove from the living room a bookshelf decorated with miniature houses, trees and other knickknacks.
Gert Baier was sad at the idea of parting with it but now finds she doesn’t miss it. She and her family agree that removing the bookshelf has made the harbor views through the floor-to-ceiling windows a clearer focal point.
This reflects a tenet Egan described weeks before staging this house: “There’s a positive in every single room of the house, or a focal point, and we just have to pinpoint that.”
There are also certain rules she follows: furniture should be at least 18 inches apart. A large piece of furniture should have balancing pieces around it. The back of a couch should not be facing the entrance to a room.
Egan looks at a multiple listing service for demographic data so she can tailor her design decisions to the lifestyle buyers may be seeking.
She also gets inspiration from catalogs, Pinterest, Houzz and HGTV shows. She credits HGTV for what she perceives as the rise in popularity of home staging over the past five years or so.
“It’s the boom, and with buyers looking at houses and seeing all these shows, that’s what they’re looking for,” Egan said. “They’re looking for houses that are move-in ready.”
She views home staging as something of a blend between interior decorating and “the whole organizing craze,” which is typically attributed to Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”
Kara Woods, vice president of the Northeast region for the Real Estate Staging Association, said the days of just posting a sign on the front lawn and waiting for a sale are gone.
“Digital photos are where it all begins and a knockout showcase photo is how you get buyers to come and see your home,” said Woods, who mostly stages in Greenwich and New Haven. “Staging is about creating a lifestyle and emotion for a potential buyer.”
According to the National Association of Realtors 2017 Profile of Home Staging, 77 percent of agents say staging makes it easier for buyers to visualize a house as their future home, and 62 percent say it decreases the amount of time a home is on the market.