When is the best time for a person to stage our condo?

[EJM]

If you hired one and felt like it was worthwhile, when did the stager come by in relation to your listing and/or open house dates?

We are still 1.5-2 months away from listing, but I got an e-mail tonight from the agent we plan to sign with (he's a friend) that he'd like for us to try out this interior designer/stager he met recently. It's free (to us) because he wants to try her out for future clients, and since he knows us we will provide him honest feedback about her he'd like for her to come by our place. She said the meetings are usually 1-2 hours. We only have 1250 square feet in a city condo so I'm not sure how much she'll be able to help us. Since it is free, no big deal if she sucks, but I'd love to get the full benefit of her services. I am not sure when to set up the appointment.

[alisong]

We met with a stager a couple of weeks before we listed our house. For us, she was really helpful, and pretty radical (had us convert one of the bedrooms into the office, and move the office out of the kitchen). It was pretty amazing the amount of de-cluttering she suggested!

[Emilie]

I have never had it done but I would say at least 3 weeks before the listing goes live in case she wants something really drastic like alisong mentioned. Let us know how it goes!

[snowzilla]

I think two or three weeks is reasonable. I'm very interested to hear how it goes for you - please update us once you go through with it!

I watch that show on A&E - Sell This House (?) - I'm always fascinated at the amount of decluttering they have to do to get ready for their open houses. But, we did it as much as possible when we sold our house, and I think it was definitely a benefit to us. (And besides, if you're moving anyways, don't think of it as decluttering - think of it as packing for your move!)

[off2skl]

We staged our own, well at least as best we could, based on what we had read and seen on the shows. I think it paid off since we had one offer in 2 weeks and the offer we accepted after 30 days on the market. We actually rented a storage facility and moved out some of the extra furniture, clothes, etc to open up the closets and the rooms. Yeah, it cost us a little extra a month, but I think it helped and like snowzilla said, I have that much less to pack now.

We also cleared everything off of surfaces and took all personal pictures off the walls, etc.

[snowzilla]

We staged our own, well at least as best we could, based on what we had read and seen on the shows. I think it paid off since we had one offer in 2 weeks and the offer we accepted after 30 days on the market. We actually rented a storage facility and moved out some of the extra furniture, clothes, etc to open up the closets and the rooms. Yeah, it cost us a little extra a month, but I think it helped and like snowzilla said, I have that much less to pack now.

We also cleared everything off of surfaces and took all personal pictures off the walls, etc.

We did this, except instead of renting a storage facility (which we considered doing), we moved tons of stuff into our detached garage. We were selling in the middle of summer, so we were able to survive without our garage for a couple of weeks.....emptying the clutter out of the house was definitely a good thing!

[EJM]

I think we are going to have the stager come through about 2 weeks in advance of listing. We already have a storage unit rented and plan to put about 1/3-1/2 of our stuff in it, so I'd rather her not tell me to put something in storage that I was already planning on doing anyway.

We settled on the 2 weeks because we have a combo kitchen/living/dining room, 2 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms. There really isn't much she can tell us to transform drastically, I would guess that she would have us rearrange furniture to open spaces up maybe. Nothing in our complex is on the market right now, which is highly unusual, and everything that has been listed in 2007 sold within 3-4 weeks of listing. We are hoping we have the same luck. I'll report back to let you know what I thought.

[justHB]

When we listed our loft, our agent recommended that we forego a stager because there are a few really well-known companies in our area that everyone uses and all the houses end up looking the same. It's really kind of hilarious when you visit open houses and see the same stuff over and over again from one house to the next.

In the end, we purged a lot of our knick-knacks and just kept our place really clean. We made sure the place was spotless the day we took photos for the listing and kept it that way until the new owners decided they were done coming in and out for measurements. In the end, I felt like we spent so much time figuring it all out and trying to keep it clean, but I also was more comfortable b/c I didn't have someone in my space telling me how I had to live for the next several weeks. I know one couple who staged their place and the house didn't sell for 6 weeks. They fired the stager, took everything out, brought their own stuff back in and the house sold within a week. The person who bought it said it looked much more lived in and homey.

[Lindsan]

My experience is the same as justHB's. Our agent didn't think our place would benefit from the quite stereotype look most stagers go for. She actually said it looked better. So we focused on keeping it absolutely spotless from phototaking to signed contract. We also had fresh flowers and fruit displayed.

I do think you need to have a flair for decorating if you are going to scratch stagers and still be successful though. I know here there are stagers that offer to come to your house and give you advice on what you could do yourself. Maybe that would be an idea? If so, I would have them come over about thre weeks before photos to give you some time to get it ready.

[EJM]

Wanted to update this thread. The stager came by yesterday, exactly 2 weeks prior to listing. We had done a ton of decluttering on our own. All in all, I thought it was a big waste of time (and if I had to pay for her, money too). She made a few suggestions, but nothing earth shattering. I haven't spoken to the realtor without her present to get his thoughts. I'm not sure if we just did a terrific job of clearing the place out or she just wasn't that great. She did suggest flowers, which we planned to do anyway.

She kept commenting about how she loved our taste, what a great job we did decorating, and we "made her job easy" since we had already cleared the place out. Maybe if we were in a larger house, her expertise might have been more worthwhile.