Property
Property//Home Stagers
words by > D. Heimpel
The NotSo-Desperate House Stagers
*Selling your home? Then it may be time to call in new furniture—and the savviest interior designers around.
Deborah Fabricant, one of LA’s top house stagers, is standing in the sunken living room of a 4,000-square-foot Spanish villa in Beverly Hills. Th e fireplace is painted a creamier white than the walls. Th at’s because Fabricant thought that the darker color would set off the fireplace and make the room look “richer.”
Fabricant is one of a growing number of home stagers. Th ese savvy
interior designers create an environment that is the most appealing to the
most people: replete with plants, set tables, bath towels and enough
furniture to fill every room. If the potential buyers can imagine
themselves actually living in the home, then they are all the more likely
to buy it, Fabricant says. “We were doing a home in the Palisades,” she
recalls. “Th e house had been on the market for months at $2.2 million.
When we got there, the place smelled, and the furniture was ratty. We
spent a week just cleaning it. A week aft er we had moved in our
furniture, the home got multiple off ers and ended up going for $2.8
million.” She is smiling proudly. In the three years she has been in
business, profits have jumped almost 150 percent each year.
Creating an
emotional connection with the home has become essential in a market waking
up to a hangover aft er the heady night of high prices and record sales
that was 2005.
The National Association of Realtors anticipates a six percent
drop from the number of homes sold in 2005—from a record 7.08 million— to
6.65 million in 2006, while the median price of homes will likely jump
another 6.4 percent.
In California, median prices have shot up over 15 percent to $561,350, according to the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, homes are staying on the market longer, up from an average of 30 days in 2005, to 44 in 2006.
It took Fabricant just two days to fill and primp the Beverly Hills home she is standing in. Within three weeks of moving the furniture in, the house was in escrow.
“We got a lot more interest once it was staged,” says owner and builder Martin Livingston, who has been building and selling residential property in Los Angeles since 1999.
Th e cost of staging with Fabricant’s firm runs from $10,000 to
$35,000, while LA’s largest staging firm, Meridith Baer and Associates,
charges anywhere from $10,000 to $75,000, depending on if the home is a $1
million barn or a $25 million estate. A staging job should cost about a
half percent of the price of the home, says Anthony Marguleas, owner of AM
Realty in Pacific Palisades. He says that a seller can expect five to six
times that percentage in dollars when the property is sold.
Meridith Baer and Associates boasts a 40,000-square-foot
warehouse stacked high with a $10 million inventory of over 35,000 pieces
of furniture used for staging homes. Th e staging business has been around
for the past 20 years, according to Meridith’s nephew Brett Baer, the
company’s business manager. In less than 10 of those years, Meridith Baer
and Associates has grown into a 40-employee behemoth, gobbling up 80
percent of the LA market and pulling in over $5 million in profits last
year.
Brett Baer attributes the firm’s success to a number of factors: a slowing market, a realtor’s and owner’s desire for an up sale, and the fact that staging creates the kind of look that buyers have become used to seeing.
“As the market slows, we have a higher growth,” he says. “A lot of people are overextended and need help.”
The past few years have been especially good for Meridith Baer
and Associates. In the past four, the company’s profits have grown over
100 percent a year. With interest rates going up, both buyers and sellers
are having a harder time making a transaction. Staging provides that
little extra something that convinces buyers that they are getting good
value for their money.
But as the real estate market cools, Marguleas warns that the same could happen to the staging market. “Last year, it was like the tech boom,” he says. “Everyone was making a lot of money, so everyone thought it was easy. We will see if staging firms can keep up their profits in the long run.”
Marguleas believes the slowdown that ramped up stagers’ profits could also make sellers loath to throw down extra cash. “In a slowdown, it’s not easy to convince somebody with a $3 to $5 million home to spend $25,000 to $100,000 for new furniture,” he says.
But if staged right, a multimillion dollar home can garner an extra few hundred thousand dollars, says Brett Baer. And as the market for stagers grows, there are more people out there doing it. Today, homes over $1 million are expected to be staged—in fact, they almost have to be.
“To not stage the house in this market would have been a real mistake,” says Livingston, standing in the master bedroom of the home he just sold with Fabricant’s help. Antique wood dressers match the dark wood of the floor, while clean white linen contrasts sharply under the canopy of a king-sized bed.
“Th ree years ago, staging really got started,” says Marguleas. “You could tell by the local real estate magazines. All of a sudden, half of the ads were for stagers.”
In Meridith Baer’s warehouse, Meridith and Brett Baer are flicking through a real estate magazine. Almost all the advertisements are theirs. Brett Baer is discussing his ideas to push the firm into new markets.
“There’s no reason to stop growing,”
Meridith Baer says. “We are an octopus that keeps adding arms.”
Th e table where they sit is piled high with magazines and pieces of cloth. Every desk in the long office next to the warehouse is overflowing with papers. Th e growth has been quick, and it seems that Meridith Baer and her team are doing everything they can to keep up.
“The place may be a pigsty, but the houses look good,” she says.
“The houses are perfect,” Brett Baer corrects.
As long as stagers like Baer and Fabricant can keep the houses looking that way, they will maintain their niche in an always-changing market.