Home & garden: Staging can set your home apart

With so many homes on the market, making a particular property stand out is a feat.

And it's also an opportunity that one local woman is trying to exploit.

Lori Lawry-Duster does home staging, and her mission is to make homes more attractive to buyers.

"If a Realtor is showing someone five vacant homes and one of them is staged, which one do you think they will remember?" Lawry-Duster said. "The way you live in your home and the way you market and sell your home are two different things."

Last month, Lawry-Duster was working on a home in the Sunridge subdivision in northern Douglas County. The day after the homeowners moved out, the entire interior was repainted and landscaping was cleaned up. The next two days were spent cleaning the carpet and interior, then one day to do the staging.

She explained that staging is not the same as decorating.

"The key to staging is less is more," Lawry-Duster said. "You want people to pay attention to the house, not the stuff that's in it. You want to define a place that is warm and inviting, and define the different living spaces so people can visualize what they are."

In this particular home, she used rented furniture to separate the living and dining areas, and set up one of the bedrooms as an office to give potential buyers different ideas on how these spaces can be used.

"Don't make people walk in and try to figure out where the furniture goes," she said.

Besides renting furniture for all of the rooms, Lawry-Duster also adds different decorative pieces to walls and counters to highlight the features, without distracting from them.

"If you were to walk into this house when it's empty, you would notice all of the little flaws because they stand out," she said. "It's not like decorating, because decorating is a personal thing. I want this home to appeal to the most amount of buyers, not just a few."

The exterior of the home also needs staging. For this house, that entailed cleaning up the existing landscaping.

"The outside has to be done too, because it doesn't matter what the inside looks like if the outside is bad," Lawry-Duster said. "They will drive right by without stopping."

Lawry-Duster said she received her training in home staging from the founder of StagedHomes.com, and is an accredited staging professional master with that organization.

For unoccupied homes, Lawry-Duster charges a fee that includes a three-month minimum for the rented furniture. The cost for this home came in less than $4,000.

Was it worth it? The home went into escrow five days after it was staged, according to the listing agent John Vettel. Due to client confidentiality, Vettel said he cannot disclose the selling price at this time, but that "the offer was so good there was no question about accepting it."

"It is a good investment," Lawry-Duster said. "The investment in home staging is less than your first price reduction. If you forgo presentation, the only leverage you have left is pricing."