The show home in Edmonton’s Lewis Estates had some pretty features: a master bedroom with a walk-in bathroom, a sun-drenched living room and a lustrous fireplace tucked into the wall.
But with a price tag over $400,000, a resemblance to other new homes in the neighbourhood and a relatively small square footage, something was needed to make it stand out in a competitive market.
That’s where Connie Williamson from Serenity Redesign comes in.
Williamson is a home stager. She’s part of a new business trend in the Edmonton area, where people trained in interior design prepare homes to sell faster and for more money.
There are two sides to the business. Home stagers either fill the empty spaces of new homes with minimalist furniture and trendy household designs, or they erase the slight messiness of family homes and reorganize them to catch a buyer’s eye.
Buyers “go to five, six, seven houses in a day. They need to remember the benefits of this particular home,” Williamson said.
“How they can live in it, what’s the square footage, what size of furniture they can put in it, can I get a round table in here or do I have to go with a rectangular table?”
Williamson focuses on the empty houses of the show home market. In Lewis Estates, she brings in canvases, black and white leather couches, a sleek, white kitchen table with chairs and a wooden bed frame for the master bedroom.
Add some black and purple throws, pillows and matching towels, silk floral bouquets and a full-bellied, laughing cook statue in the kitchen and voila! – an empty room turned into a modern living space.
“Staging accents architectural features … As soon as I put furniture in there, it will direct people to where I want them to stand and where I want them to go,” she said.
“When the room is empty, there is no balance. There is no organization.”
When working in pre-owned homes, stagers remove the individual style of the homeowners: paint colour (that hot pink in the bedroom), family photographs, cluttered countertops, disordered bookshelves and dirty trashcans.
They even tell you to put down the toilet seat, clean the windows and to make the bed before the buyers come to visit, said Johanne Lewis, who often works as a home stager in St. Albert with her company MoJo Design.
“You want to enhance the natural features, not the collection of teddy bears or dolls or whatever might be in the home,” she said.
Lewis said staging can be as easy as consulting someone on what to clean out and fix in their home. Or it goes as far as moving existing furniture around or out of the house, and replacing it.
Most stagers have storage areas or warehouses, filled with everything from pillows to matching towels and paintings.
Williamson said she owns about 4,000 square feet of storage space. Mojo Design rents their accessories and furniture from another company. Every so often, they clean out the warehouses, sell the old furniture and stock up with new models.
The service is costly, but most stagers agree that it’s cheaper than taking $5,000 to $10,000 off the initial sales price if the home doesn’t sell in the first months.
“And if people know that they will be moving in a couple of years, and they do a few jobs around the house or minor renovations to the house … why not do it two years before you move out and actually enjoy the benefits,” Lewis said.
Lewis and her business partner Maureen Wright charge $210 for a consultation meeting, and 1.0 to 1.5 per cent of the selling price for a full staging.
For one of Williamson’s show homes, charges can go over $2,000. That includes getting the furniture delivered, setting it up and leaving it in the home for 30 days. A home consultation with her costs $135.
While home stagers have hit it off in Toronto and Vancouver, stagers in Edmonton still struggle with getting a foot in the door with local realtors.
Don Cholak with Royal LePage in St. Albert said staging adds value to properties, especially when they are empty or lack the right furniture. He wouldn’t suggest the service to everyone, though.
“It’s not for everybody. Some clients have no interest in it and for some properties it doesn’t help or it’s not worth it,” he said.
“It may be its location, it may that there are structural problems with the home that staging is not going to fix or remedy. Staging is cosmetic.”
He added that the trend for staging depends on the market. With less real estate on the market, the need for home beautification rises. In a hot market homes still sell without the extra touch.
Other realty firms have simply incorporated home staging into their business model.
“We do it for all our houses, all the re-sale homes,” said Kristin Boser with Sarasota Realty in St. Albert.
“Whether we just fluff it up a little or if the home is vacant. We put in beds and tables, and couches. It really, really helps with the sale of the home.”
Boser has offered staging services for four years. The service comes at no extra charge and helps to sell properties sooner, often within the first month, and for more money.
Lewis and Wright see a benefit in less cooperation between realtors and stagers.
“You have to tell people to remove the cooking smells and the smells of pets, which can be insulting to a few people,” said Wright.
“We are the bad guys who go in and say you have to change this … and this helps the realtors because they have a lasting relationship with the client and we won’t.”
