In the Region | New Jersey: When a Little Imagination Sells a Home
January 9, 2011
IN the photo on realtor.com, there is a settee to the left of a carved wood-and-stone fireplace, a velvet-upholstered armchair to the right. There are leather-bound books on the built-in shelves, and linen-shaded accent lamps illuminating an oak-paneled ceiling, plaster wall medallions, and royal crests and figures set into stained-glass windows and doors.
But the living room of the actual house, a slate-roofed Tudor at 316 Highland Avenue, is empty.
The sellers have moved on and taken the furnishings with them.
Anyone visiting the house — now on the market for $749,000, $100,000 less than it was 14 months ago — sees indentations on the beige carpet where the settee used to be, and dark shadows enveloping the medallions and empty shelves.
“He sort of got caught, I guess,” said Diana Scrittorale of Coldwell Banker, the listing agent, describing the owner’s predicament. “There were two offers in the $790,000s while he was still looking for his new house, and then after he found it the market went down — or down further, I should say.”
In November the furnishings were removed, save for a house plant here and there, a couple of chairs, and a few lamps. “It’s too bad that the amazing detail in here doesn’t show up so well now,” Ms. Scrittorale said. “It may cost the seller some money.”
With the market still generally limp and unpredictable in New Jersey, more owners are finding themselves unable to wait out the time their houses spend on the market — and more houses are being shown empty. It turns out that among brokers, there is a wide variety of opinion as to how much that matters, or whether it matters at all.
“In some cases it makes no difference,” said Brigitte Van Note of Rhodes Van Note Company Realtors in Montclair. “In some cases, it’s even better to have them clear out everything.”
If a sale is not being attempted under economic duress, emotional strain or severe time constraints, brokers said, an agent might suggest hiring a professional house-stager. But those issues, or others, often weigh against the option. At the Highland Avenue house, for example, heavy snowfall in late December more or less squelched the notion of delivering replacement furniture; even though the driveway is heated, snow was piled high everywhere else.
Ms. Van Note recently sold another large Tudor in adjacent Glen Ridge — bare-boned, except for a sofa and a piano in the living room, several side tables, and some poinsettias — after just two weeks. The asking price was $799,000.
“The family that lived there took everything they wanted,” Ms. Van Note said. “We sort of swept in and removed everything else, and the house showed beautifully.”
Of course, she added, for that technique to work, a house must be in good shape, without the flaws or wear usually masked by furniture and decoration.
In a pinch, several brokers and agents said, they bring in items of furniture from their own garages, or maybe divert the books they were planning on contributing to a church sale, to provide a little shelf life to an empty room.
Others say they simply employ intangibles to stimulate buyers’ imagination: posting pictures in online listings that show rooms furnished as they used to be — or, in a walk-through, relying on lively patter about where a potential buyer’s possessions might fit perfectly.
“Virtual” online furnishing is starting to catch on in New Jersey, said Maggee Miggins, a Keller Williams Realty agent in the Short Hills area, who recently tried it for the first time. To attract interest in a vacant Maplewood three-bedroom home whose owner had departed abruptly after falling behind on the mortgage, she hired a service that uses digital technology to transform pictures of empty space into attractively furnished rooms.
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