Realtor Marcia Bergen and her team depersonalize homes to appeal to the largest cross-section of potential buyers.
MARCIA Bergen hasn’t invented a housing time machine but she’s found the next best thing. The Winnipeg-based Realtor is the city’s biggest proponent of staging a house before putting it on the market to help recapture that new home smell.
After taking inventory of everything in your house, including furniture, bedding, art work, accessories, lighting, carpets and even the paint on the walls, she determines what can stay and what needs to be brought in from the warehouse to turn back the clock to your house’s show home days.
Your favourite couch from where you watch television? Gone. Your uncle’s expressionist paintings in the living room? Gone.
Your university coffee table engraved with the retro Winnipeg Jets logo? Sorry.
In their place, Bergen’s team will move in a sectional that’s just daring you to lie down for a nap, modern artwork that jumps off the walls and a coffee table guaranteed to fire up your book club debate over pumpkin spice lattes.
It all comes from a warehouse chock full of furniture, art and accessories. The idea is to depersonalize the house — that’s why all those pictures of your kids on the fridge are the first to be boxed up — so it will appeal to the biggest cross-section of people coming through the door.
“Doing so minimizes objections from buyers. They’re seeing a clean palate where they can see themselves living,” Bergen says. Staging your house can have a number of significant benefits.
First, the average home in the Winnipeg market sells in 30 days. Staged homes sell in one-third of that time. And second, a well-staged home can sell for between five and 10 per cent more than the listing price. One south River Heights home, for example, was listed for $639,000 in the summer and sold a week-and-a-half later for $760,000, more than 16 per cent over the list price.
“I think houses should look their absolute best to maximize their resale vale. For most people, the bulk of their net worth is their home. Getting 10 per cent extra for most of my clients is a lot of money. That can change lives,” she says.
“I talk about it with my clients, what is a worthwhile investment? How can we make the house look the best with the least amount of money spent?” Bergen has been staging homes for 13 years but it’s been growing steadily in popularity.
Today, just a handful of her listings are shown as-is. She notes it’s not practical for home sellers to buy new furniture to stage their home because the new items might not work in their new property.
Sometimes context is all that’s needed to change the vibe of a room. For example, a professional couple may look at a four-bedroom house and think it’s too big. But turn one of those bedrooms into an office and another one into a gym and suddenly it’s perfect.
Staging has a cost, of course. Bergen charges a per centage of the selling cost, payable upon the house selling. The staging services also include a cleaning service to clean the house and windows. Sometimes Bergen will recommend painting a room or two or some small repairs, which is at another staging price point. “If you want to make the money, you need to put the time and effort into it. I’m super passionate about it,” she says.
(204) 960-6872 marcia@marciabergen.com
