For the average agent, the intersection of real estate and the creative arts is usually a matter of coming up with the perfect – or sometime just the most judicious – adjective for their listing description. But there’s one area of home selling where aesthetics and sales really do combine: the art of staging.

A survey conducted earlier this year by the National Association of Realtors found that a strong majorities of agents cite proper staging as a positive influence on buyer sentiment toward the homes they viewed. More than 80 percent of respondents said their clients found it easier to visualize themselves living in a staged home, while more than half of buyer agents said their clients put in higher bids for staged homes. Thirty-two percent said good staging boosted bids from 1 to 5 percent; 16 percent found quality staging caused increases of 6 to 10 percent, and only 19 percent felt staging had no impact final sales prices.

But it can still be tricky to convince home sellers to take the leap into staging. When a well-staged home can potentially boost final sales prices 5 percent or more, an investment of 1 to 2 percent of the list price in staging more than pays for itself – and that can mean more substantial changes than just swapping some throw pillows.

“Staging is an investment that you get a return on when you sell the house,” said Birgit Anich, principal of Brigit Anich Staging and Interiors LLC, a staging consultancy based in Fairfield County. “It’s is a marketing tool, it’s the packaging of the product. Large corporations may hire a market research company to decide who is the target buyer,” and home sellers should be no different, she suggested.

Buyers in Fairfield today are often busy young professionals looking to start families, and they’re attracted to modern, contemporary designs. If they walk into a home and see a dated kitchen, “they think, ‘I’m going to have to spend [an additional] $50,000 to make this work for me,’ and they’ll put in a lowball offer,” said Anich.

It may be necessary to at least repaint the kitchen, replace cabinet hardware and even countertops to freshen up the look so that it has an appeal to the target buyer. “We want to give them a lifestyle experience – we call it ‘aspirational lifestyle staging.’ That means, we want to give them the dream that they want to have,” said Anich.

A Home Becomes A House

Getting clients to commit to bigger changes can be a tough sell that requires a bit of skillful psychology on the part of the stager.

Cindy Heiman, founder of Home ReVisions Staging in Fairfield, said she tells her clients, “It’s my job to tell you everything that I know about preparing a property for sale. You can do all of it, some of it, or none of it, but I’m being asked to come here and give you as much information as you need to consider to prepare the property. It’s not a judgment on how you live; how we live and how we sell are two different things. It was your home. Now it becomes a house.”

“But I also tell [clients to] let me know what’s non-negotiable. Even if I would want it to go, I respect the fact that it’s not going to go, and that’s the beauty of what being a stager is, is working around some of the elements – furniture, artwork – and still making it look right.”

Editing pieces and de-cluttering are two nearly universal tasks that every seller should undertake before selling, stagers said. But in Connecticut in particular, many older, higher-end homes are decorated in a more traditional styles that embrace the state’s colonial heritage, which may mean floral-print wall-paper, oak paneling and lots of antique furniture and collectibles. Stagers agree such features and furnishings turn off more contemporary buyers than they appeal to, and in some case it may be worth temporarily replacing furnishings with more contemporary items in order to help a home sell quickly.

Email: csullivan@thewarrengroup.com