Susan Miller Staging

The staged life. Very fake and very perfect and very beautiful. It sells. Like lipstick. Like highlights hiding the gray hairs. Like Viagra…
Our goal was to shorten the amount of time my client’s home is on the market while reducing the buyer’s negotiation angle… an empty house seems lonely and sad. Seeing it staged and «cool» and getting an early offer will (hopefully) insure my client will not have to take a lower offer than she wants… which, at this point, and looking as awesome as the house looks, would be a full price offer. In this market??? Yes.
Susan Miller is a professional interior designer, so you get the benefit of someone — trained in making interior spaces look like dynamite– advising you on how to make your space as cool and desirable as possible. Her design advice was solid and the installation which she supervised looks fresh and cool. Not fake at all.
While we don’t have a crystal ball and we will never know if it was the staging that made a difference, I do know that it cannot hurt AND no one likes the idea of leaving money on the table.
As far as fees to have a professional interior designer consult, choose furniture, deliver furniture, and install with towels and plants and pillows… this is a small house. We staged the living, kitchen, master bedroom, and master bathroom. We used my client’s dining room table, and Susan added the place settings, plants and art. Cost for delivery, setup and first month’s fee is $ 1500 for this amount of furniture. Each additional month is $ 750. Susan came to the house for a free consultation and let us know about what she would provide for the fees.
This would get cost prohibitive, in my opinion, when the home is on the market for 6+ months. In that case you might as well buy the furniture. If we can sell in 1 – 3 months for close to asking price, totally worth it in my opinion.
An additional service that she provided, which kind of shocked me, was advising us about window coverings, shopping for sheers and drapes, steaming them, installing them with rods. I think she just charged for the retail price on what she bought. In the living space on both sides of the fireplace… and then again above the bed in the master bedroom. Made a HUGE difference, and my client paid her about $ 350 for that additional service.
This was my first time using a stager, and, honestly, the staged life has always given me hives. While I feel it is too perfect, too sterile, I HAVE had those moments of salivating over the purrfectly staged and furnitured Dwell magazine interior… like a re-​touched and photo-​shopped cover model… yum. So unattainable.
My intuition is that we will get a couple quick offers… because buyers can SEE themselves there… they do not have to imagine anything.
After walking in and seeing her home staged, my client actually squealed, «Now I don’t want to sell it!»
«Great,» I thought, after 6 months of working with her to get it looking purrrfect, «…great…»