Professional staging edits clutter, smells

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Even if they adore children and animals, potential buyers shopping for a new home don't want to be distracted by children's toys and clutter, smell unpleasant pet odors or notice clumps of animal hair on the furniture. Sellers with small children or pets might consider hiring an accredited professional stager (ASP) who can provide simple guidelines to help them redirect potential buyers' focus to the home's highlights as a welcoming, livable space.

When Jennifer Ponsart put her three-story, four-bedroom house in Manassas on the market last summer, she decided to work with an accredited stager to give her home a competitive edge.

She hired Deborah Gorham, a Realtor with Long & Foster in Reston with the ASP designation, to help her market the home, where she lived with her two children, age 5 and 10, and two cats.

Though the house across the street lingered on the market for close to a year, Mrs. Ponsart's house sold the day it was listed -- and for her asking price of $512,000.

"I definitely feel that it sold because of staging," she says.

While interior decorators infuse personality into a home and decorate forward, Dana Dickey, executive director of Interior Redesign Industry Specialists, based in Chicago, says stagers edit the property backward. Their goal is to depersonalize it and return it to the beauty it had when the owners first bought it.

"Realtors will tell you about location, location, location, but appearance is what you control," Ms. Dickey says.

Homeowners with a large family, including many pets, may not recognize the disorder and accumulation of items in their homes. A stager can help them with a fresh perspective on how to rearrange, organize and get rid of unnecessary items.

"The homeowner often walks right by things they don't see as clutter," Ms. Dickey says. In a home with many young children, Ms. Dickey recommends that children prioritize which playthings are most important to them and pack up the rest.

Ms. Gorham says that rather than focusing on the children's array of toys or the barking dog, the buyers must be able to visualize how the house will work for them.