She simply went to her closet or looked under her bed to find accessories she no longer displayed in her own home to jazz up one of her seller’s houses.

These days, when staging a home, she heads to a 15,000 square foot warehouse to choose amongst the furniture and other decorative items, which now number enough to stage about 40 homes at one time.

And Sewell believes the success of Jan Sewell Design ha been an integral part of her achievements as an agent.

“I really took a chance on this staging thing. Everybody thought I was completely out of my mind,”

she ays. “And I think it’s worked really well. It’s done huge things for my clients. People really do make more money and their homes sell faster. That’s been great to be able to do that for people.”

Not surprisingly, Sewell worked in event production prior to becoming an agent. Through that work, he had met a REALTOR who kept bugging her about getting licensed, though he wasn’t the first to suggest it. “People had told me off and on all of my life that maybe I should get into real estate.” She finally gave in to the urging and earned her license in 1993.

After a few year in the business, Jan began to experiment with staging her listings. It was something she heard about, and had not forgotten, during a seminar she had taken her first year as an agent. “The whole idea made sense to me. It just kind of resonated with me,” she says.

“One of the things I discovered is most people really can’t visualize. It’s very hard for them to see past other people’s style.”

On the other hand, it can also be off-putting for potential buyers to find anything that is too familiar, says Sewell. “One of my theories about staging is people are buying the future when they buy a house and they don’t want something that reminds them of their past. I found this out a little bit by going to my clients’ houses and seeing that exactly what they have at home is what they cannot get past seeing in other people’ houses.”

During her third year as an agent, he put her theories to work, redecorating for-sale homes by rearranging the furniture or bringing in art or other accessorie from her own home.

“My right brain needed a little workout, it wanted some creative outlet. And I thought this would make really good sense: when the market is slow people would really need staging. And when the market is fast, they wouldn’t need it, so I could just do real estate,” he says, though she soon realized there were flaws with that line of reasoning. “Well, that sounded good, but that’s actually not the way it works. People are much more willing to pay for staging when it’s a fast market. Even though they might need it more in a slow market, everybody’s really reluctant to spend money at that point.”

Still, she knew that staging could help ell homes faster and for more money.

“The guy in my office would go, ‘ Ugh, there goes Jan with the S-word again,’” she imitates with pronounced exasperation. “But by the end of my first year, they were all pretty convinced because I had such remarkable results with it.

“I just started by pulling stuff our from under my bed and staging my clients’ houses, and rearranging their furniture and maybe adding some accessories. Then I threw the word out in the community that I was interested in staging. Pretty soon agent started asking me if I would come do what I was doing to their listings. It just kind of grew.”

Further, it presented her with an opportunity to have a different relationship with other agents. “It’s also been very good for me in the community. I’m one of those agents who thinks good relationships within the community are crucial to doing business.”

She says real estate can be a lonely business and considers herself lucky to have those relationships with colleagues where she’s not the competition.

“We’re always either competing with each other for a listing or a buyer or we’re on the other side of a transaction negotiating for our clients. But because I’m in staging, I can be on the same side a other agents with their client.”

When Jan first began staging he says she did encounter agents who were wary of having her stage a home because they were worried that she may have trouble separating her role as an agent, the concern being she would try to steal their clients or give the seller conflicting information or advice on an aspect of selling their home outside of just interior decorating.

Her answer to anyone who suggests such a thing now: “Do you think I would have a successful business after all these years if that’s what I did?”

In the beginning, Sewell says her real estate business suffered as she focused on staging, often working 12 to 18 hours days, seven days a week. Today she has a crew of three talented designers, an administrator, an accountant and other occasional help to manage most of the staging, though she remains hands on when it comes to her own listings.

She also has to step in when a difficult situations arises. “We put in our contract that they are giving us full design control, but it doesn’t always happen like that. Because of HGTV and other home improvement shows, she says

sometimes sellers feel compelled to exercise their own creative ideas.

As far as services available through Sewell design, it depends upon whether the home is vacant or occupied. If vacant, her team will furnish and accessorize part of the home or go all out and do the entire thing. If the home i occupied, they will provide consultation services to determine if certain repairs or updates would be beneficial, plus rearrange furnishings or bring in accessories. They even will coordinate with contractors, if necessary, and provide color consultations if painting is part of the solution.

Sewell says there is truth to what she calls a classic staging quote: “The more it feels like your house, the Iess somebody else can imagine themselves in it.”

So if collectable or family photos are covering the room and wall , it can be quite difficult for potential buyer to see themselves in the pace.

“People are generally pretty polite and they feel like they’re trespassing [when viewing a home]. When it’s obviously somebody else’s house and is an expression of them, they kind of tiptoe around. And they can’t imagine it being theirs,” she says, “which is one of the things staging accomplishes, it kind of depersonalize it a little bit so that you can sit there and think, ‘Wow, I could live like this.”,

But, Jan says, a stager must be careful not to create an image that buyers can’t recreate themselves. “One of the thing I really try to do is stage the house to the level of the person who is going to be buying it,” she says. “You don’t put totally inaccessible things in a house. You don’t put in things that they would never have any chance of buying. If it’ an entry-level house, you put entry-level furniture in it. You make it look good, but don’t make it look impossible.”

That means no chandeliers or high-end furniture in a home that i more likely to attract first-time buyer. Still, it is a fine line. Even those who can afford high-end homes may not be able to fully furnish it that way, which may be a big enough disappointment to turn the buyers off. Sewell illustrates this point with an experience he had before she started staging. She was with buyers looking at a million dollar home, which was pretty expensive in those days and seemed even more so because of the expensive antiques adorning the home. “There probably wasn’t a piece of furniture in there that cost Iess than $2,000 … and it was a huge house. The client said, ‘We could by this house, but we couldn’t afford to furnish it,’” she recalls. “That was a lesson to me that I kept for future reference.”

When she’s wearing her REALTOR® pin, Sewell uses her staging expertise to help buyers see the possibilities of a pace, but she must help them see through the mirage a well.

“I tell buyers that when I’m working with them my job is to help them see through what I do on the other end, too. To actually see the house instead of being charmed” by the staging.

“My whole philosophy behind staging is that people have the same fear of commitment when they buy a house as they do when they get into a relationship. It  takes the same thing, which is falling in love. The whole idea with staging is to make

people fall in love,” she says.

“It’s not to hide anything. I’m really clear with people that if we put a rug over a big stain on the floor that they need to disclose that. We just don’t want that to be the first thing people see, we don’t want them to not know about it.”

“It’s kind of like putting your best foot forward,” and not about being deceitful, he ays. “It’s like when you go out on a date – you dress up. You look your best. And that’ what staging i about.”

Just like a happy couple can ignore minor fault in each other, when a buyer falls in love with a home, it’s much easier to look past minor issues. An example she uses is how a buyer could ignore something like a busy street if they’ve fallen in love with the home, whereas if they didn’t love the home, the busy street could be the main reason they cite for not wanting the home.

“It’s the same kind of fear of commitment. People get frozen. If you fall in love, you get over that.”

People also become smitten with her staging work. Jan frequently has homeowners, both buyers she’s helped and those who’ve bought homes she staged, who ask her for decorating help once they’ve moved into their new home . Though she doesn’t have the time to do it, her staff of designers often will step up for the job.

Homeowners may get lucky with her team’s design skills, but she has to draw the line at selling her staging props to them, as many people request. “They usually try to buy it at garage sale price,” he says, which is just not financially feasible for Sewell to do. Be ides the cost of replacing a piece of furniture, the time and energy it take to go to find the replacement furniture make it not worth ‘it.

She says many people ask why she doesn’t quit real estate to focus only on staging.

“I gross four times as much in staging, but I net four time as much in real estate. So that’ the pretty obvious financial answer, but the truth of the matter i I would totally miss real estate if I wan’t doing it. I love the interactions with people. I love the problem solving.”

She continues, “And this year, that’s been one of the hardest thing about the economy is that I’m used to doing thing that make people happy, and gosh, nobody’s been very happy this year. There’s just no easy way out of the situation people are in. There’s just a lot of sad stories … some really successful people who didn’t do anything particularly wrong, they just have to move before they can make any money on their place or not have the ability to get out. It’s painful.”

For example, this year Jan says she had a past client who got divorced and could no longer make the payment on her home. They put her place on the market for what Jan thought was a great price, and the least she could sell it for without losing money on it, but nothing happened. Her situation was resolved when she got a loan modification that allowed her to stay in her home. “I spent a lot of money on the listing and didn’t make anything on it. But I ended up feeling good because we solved her problem. It’s a big reward for me.”

The market has also had an impact on staging and the homes Sewell stages. She is doing much more redesign as opposed to decorating vacant spaces these days.

“For a long time I didn’t do anything but empty houses, because it was so painful to do people’s houses, both for me and for them, when they were still living in them. Because people still really identify with their home at that point and here you come in with all this stuff. The implication – even if you’ve told them a million times this is not what’s going on – is that their stuff is bad and yours is good. They also feel like their house is representative of them and it’s hard for people to let go of that. So I didn’t do anything but empty houses, furnishing them,” she says, “but now I have to because people can’t afford to buy before they sell anymore.”

Even though thing are tough right now, would he leave it behind? When asked whether he would leave staging to focus solely on real estate, Sewell laughs. “I tell people it’s like riding a tiger: you can’t get off without getting eaten.”

This is partly because he has so much inventory that would be difficult to sell all at once, leaving her paying a storage unit rental fee but no longer having all the inventory to stage homes in order to pay the overhead, but also because she knows it’s intertwined with her role as an agent.

“I really think that my real estate business is better from staging. I think ‘How would I do it if I couldn’t stage my own Iisting?’” She adds, “It’s how I work. It’s part of my identity. I don’t know how to divorce myself from it at this point.”

RE • January-February 2010, pp19-23