Home, Bland Home - Agents Strip Home's Personality All in the
Name of Faster Sales
Authored: June Fletcher
Publisher: The Wall Street Journal
15/06/2003
Steve and Karen Mazzo's California home was a lively testament to
their world travels, with Buddha statues on the end tables and Champs-Élysée
paintings on the walls. But when they put it on the market four
months ago, their real-estate agents made them pack it all away
-- and then showed up with a van filled with chairs, china and antique
books. The result was clean, stylish, and nothing like their home.
"Everything personal was gone," says Mr. Mazzo.
When it comes to selling homes these days, agents want one thing
out of the house: you. And that goes for your high-school hockey
trophies and your Hummel collection, too. Armed with data they say
show homes sell twice as fast when they've had the seller's personality
sucked out, agents and consultants are turning this into a growing
business -- charging from about $100 an hour to $100,000 for a full-home
makeover. It's called everything from "staging" to "fluffing,"
but folks in the real-estate business have another quiet name for
it: "blanding."
Agents, of course, have long been taking on taste-challenged homes,
adding a throw pillow here or ditching a few chairs there. But the
idea of neutralizing the seller's personality really started taking
off three years ago, after Los Altos, Calif., real-estate broker
Joy Valentine published a study showing professionally "staged"
homes sold in 13.9 days, half the usual time on the market -- and
went for 6.3% over list price, or four times the average markup
on unstaged homes. Business has doubled in the last two years at
Los Angeles's Designed to Move, and the company now has affiliates
from as far away as Florida. "The idea is to depersonalize,"
says Barb Schwarz, a San Franciscan who runs StagedHomes.com, a
competing service, and has even trademarked the word "staging."
"Your house has to become a product."
The Jury Is Out
The depersonalized-home movement has its detractors, of course.
For some sellers, the advice seems basic, and they can't see spending
hundreds of dollars for someone to tell them to paint the walls
beige -- especially because these decorators don't need licensing
or training to dispense the advice. Buyers, too, never know whether
those blanding fees may have been added to the sale price. And anyway,
the jury's still out on whether bland is better: There's a competing
school of interior decorators who say the best way to sell a home
is to add color -- and, yes, "family photos."
Roy and Jane Ann Williams decided blanding may be worth a shot,
so they hired a "stylist" before putting their Bronxville,
N.Y., home on the market recently. After hearing they should buy
white carpeting and hide their recliners, photos and books, the
retired couple arranged most of the work themselves, from painting
walls and refinishing floors to putting in a beige couch. To make
up for the $8,000 price tag -- including $450 for the consultant
-- they upped their asking price by $10,000. And if no one wants
to pay? "Then we'll have gambled and lost," Mrs. Williams
says.
For their part, these consultants say this work isn't easy, and
that even the wealthiest home sellers need to be protected from
themselves. Aimee Miller, a property enhancer with Los Angeles's
Designed to Move, says even million-dollar homes have big issues.
She's found everything from pet smells and silverfish in books to
black velvet nude self-portraits, altars for five religions, and
a C3PO statue in a foyer. And Mary Sullivan, a home stager in Fairfax
Station, Va., says she persuaded a customer to paint over the fresco
reproduction of Michelangelo's David he'd put on his dining-room
wall. "Money does not always equal style," she says.
'Move That La-Z-Boy'
To dispel criticism and provide credentials, some of these consultants
have created professional associations. Ms. Schwartz created the
International Association of Home Staging Professionals two years
ago, and it has grown from 25 to 105 members, while the competing
Interior Arrangement and Design Association has grown sixfold since
2000, to 300 members. Both say their courses, which cost as much
as $4,000, teach marketing as much as they do design sense. "Everyone
knows what's OK in terms of aesthetics," says Shell Brodnax,
a spokeswoman for the group. "The challenge is to convince
the client to move that La-Z-Boy."
The irony is, while these folks are taking the personality out
of homes, there's a whole competing school of people, "new-home
merchandisers," who are trying to put it back in. In Corona
del Mar, Calif., Karen Butera-King says she sprinkles homey touches
throughout, like bedroom slippers and framed pictures of faux families.
And over in Pacific Palisades, an outfit called Color Design Art
often paints walls bright blue or yellow, and throws around colorful
rugs, to help buyers connect emotionally with the home.
Home buyer Kim Bowman says it wouldn't have made a difference either
way. She bought the Mazzo home after it had been cleansed of its
books and Buddha statues -- but says that it was the home's location,
size and big backyard that sold her. "In fact, the house was
more decorated than I would do," she says. But Paul Conti,
the San Jose, Calif., real-estate agent who threw in the staging
as part of the listing service, says that while people don't notice
the effect, they'd miss it if it weren't there. "The fact that
they bought the house in two weeks is proof enough," he says.
And in the end, some sellers are just happy for someone to come
in and force them to clean house. In Fairfax, Va., Charlene Gromley
was thrilled that her stager decreed that the books and records
had to go. That's something Ms. Gromley has been nagging her husband
and grown sons to do for years -- but with the word coming from
a pro, they finally capitulated. "I finally had the excuse
to get rid of these things," she says.
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