Meridith Baer, a well-known home staging expert who has staged homes for many A-list celebrities, has seen her business grow more than expected.
Today, she runs South Gate-based Meridith Baer Home with more than 250 employees and roughly 150 properties staged per month.

“I discovered staging accidentally when I put my furniture at a friend’s house, and it sold so quickly. All of a sudden, I said, ‘Boy, there is a need for this,’” she said.
The job of a home stager, simply put, is to stage or place borrowed furniture in a home in a way that makes it easier to sell.

“If you’re going to get married, you want to put on your prettiest dress and look your best, and it seems a shame to go out to market without doing everything you can to show the house at its best,” Baer said.
And beyond selling faster, experts agree that homes that are well-staged sell for more than their unfurnished or poorly furnished counterparts.
 
Carmine Sabatella, a Compass agent and designer on HGTV’s “Inside Out,” said staging can increase the value of a home by 10% to 15%.
“I’ve always been a firm believer that staging is crucial for any sale of a home. The average person doesn’t have spatial awareness and a good design eye. … When you have staging, it does allow people to go, ‘OK, I can make this smaller bedroom into an office,’” and see the home’s full potential, he added.

Sabatella, who worked for a staging company in Hollywood before becoming an agent full time, said staging has become crucial during the Covid-19 pandemic as more people are doing virtual tours.

He added that staging was so important that he has spent nearly $20,000 on staging a home, but a smaller home of 1,500 square feet can cost closer to $6,000.
Susan Smith, an agent with Beverly Hills-based Hilton & Hyland Real Estate Inc., agreed that staging “has a huge impact to me on the increased value of the home.”
Rooms, she said, look much larger when staged, and it gives buyers a better frame of reference. Smith said staging can raise a home’s price 5% to 10% and helps homes sell quickly.

Over the years, she has worked with stagers including Baer and Pico Rivera-based Vesta Home, another big player in L.A.’s home staging scene.
Brett Baer, a Vesta spokesperson and Meridith Baer’s nephew, called the Covid era “a very interesting moment in housing.”

He said that when the Covid pandemic began, there was a fear that the housing market would shut down like the market had in 2008 and 2009, “but it has really been the opposite, where the market for home staging really exploded and part of that staging has really evolved,” Brett Baer said. “It’s not just furniture to demonstrate how to live. It often is the furniture being used to live in. In addition to that, houses are being furnished with the expectation that that furniture will be used in people’s next iteration of the space.”

Tailoring staging to specific needs also has been a factor in the way business is booming.
“There’s also, especially in the luxury market … the budgets for staging have really exploded,” Brett Baer said. “People not only want it staged but want it articulated in a very nuanced way, a very design-specific way. They want to see designs that are less generic.”

Brett Baer worked with his aunt Meridith Baer for more than a decade. He, along with his sister and her husband, have become involved in a legal feud with Meridith Baer Home.

Keeping the furniture

One of the biggest changes to hit the home-staging industry is that more buyers are renting or purchasing the furniture they see in the homes than before.
Brett Baer said roughly 30% of the pieces Vesta Home uses in staged homes are rented, leased or reworked — a tenfold increase since before Covid.

“People see the home as a whole, the house and the furnishings as opposed to in the past where there was much more of an intent by buyers to do their own interior design,” he said.
Meridith Baer said people are having more trouble getting furniture in a timely manner, which has increased local furniture sales.

“We offer everything for sale except for the mattresses,” she said. “We have been selling a ton of furniture during this time because it’s been so hard for people to get it, and there’s a long wait.”
Some are leasing while they wait for their own furniture to come in, she said, adding that furniture leases have become about 25% of her business.

She is also seeing a 200% uptick in furniture sales compared to pre-Covid levels.
Hilton & Hyland’s Smith said she is especially seeing buyers interested in purchasing furniture in larger homes.

“It’s taking a lot longer to get furniture for your homes, so people are extending their leases on these staged homes or outright buying the furniture on the homes, and that’s a lot more common now than it was even two years ago,” Smith said.
One other thing that’s changed during the pandemic is the importance of creating spaces like home offices and gyms that are in higher demand now.

Home staging shows off where you can work in a specific room or space.
“People want to feel like they have a designated space to work without getting interrupted,” said Tami Pardee, founder and chief executive of Venice-based Pardee Properties.

Pardee added that people have found there are some rooms that aren’t being used, which staging can reimagine to be an office, a yoga room or something else more useful.
“People want access to all the things they used to have, but in their homes now,” she said.

Brett Baer said that with all properties now, there is an expectation that there would be at least one but possibly even two home offices for people working from home. Sometimes, this means carving space out of bedrooms or other areas.
Meridith Baer added that whereas before Covid, bedroom count was seen as being more important, now bedrooms are frequently being turned into an office.

She is also getting more requests for gyms than before.
Pardee said in smaller homes, a home gym could even be a Peloton under a staircase that has a feel of being its own space without taking up a whole room.

Picking up steam

And experts say the home staging trend won’t wane.
“It’s going to pick up even more,” Pardee said. “We really highly suggest it and will even work with people on paying for it because we feel that it’s so important.”
Smith agreed.

“I think it definitely will be a more desirable part of selling the homes, especially with more people having issues getting furniture,” Smith said.
She added that staging art is becoming more common, too, in high-end homes, and she sees that continuing.

Vesta’s Brett Baer said that while staging has always “been aspirational,” he is seeing more people understand the importance of staging and using it, as well as people continuing to buy and rent furniture.
Vesta, he added, has also “moved into interior design in a big way.”

“People have been using us on private interior design projects and all types of interior design,” he said.
He added that more people are also using Vesta’s services for vacation rentals and secondary homes.

The company is also showcasing more outdoor furniture, which he said is important to clients.
For Meridith Baer, the industry’s growth is also causing her company to expand.
Over this past year, the company has been doing more homes in Aspen and Vail in Colorado, and it sent a container of furniture to Atlanta, in addition to doing an installation in North Carolina.
 
“It seems like the whole idea of staging is catching on in all parts of the country,” she said.