In today’s red-hot real-estate market, sellers are realizing it pays to rent new furniture, art, and accessories.

A visit to Patti Houston’s showroom will hit home with anyone who’s trying to unload a house or condo. At Flüff Rentals, the lobby is done up like a high-end display suite, each corner featuring a compact and nattily decorated living space. The immaculate back warehouse bursts with hundreds of elegant objects from lamps to sofas to vases, many of them organized by colour on towering shelves. Down to the flatware, every last item is for rent. If you’re selling and want to wow prospective buyers, it’s enough to make you throw your stuff in storage and order one of everything.

The attention to detail here is no fluke: Houston has long done home-staging work for her husband, a real-estate developer. She opened Flüff (motto: We Source You Style) this February, after realizing she spent too much time in the car hunting down furniture and accessories. “I wished there was something under one roof where I could just go,” recalls Houston, who sensed that others shared her frustration.

She was right. Business has been brisk at Flüff (317 West 5th Avenue, 604-876-3747), and not just from Houston’s fellow designers. As home staging—also called house fluffing—becomes more entrenched in Vancouver, ordinary people have started doing it for themselves. Besides interior-design professionals and realtors, Houston sees homeowners who understand that renting some stylish new furnishings can boost resale value. To put them at ease, she groups her largely soft-contemporary stock into what she calls colour stories. “Somebody will go through here and it just resonates, because they’ll like that turquoise group or they’ll like that pink group, and then we can help them,” says Houston, who estimates that Flüff helps stage about 25 percent of its rentals; the rest of her clientele makes its own décor decisions.

To keep things fresh, Houston sources from Seattle and Eastern Canada as well as locally. Her three essentials for newbie stagers: a sofa, large-format art (there are some 50 pieces in the warehouse), and tons of pillows. Houston makes her own line of the latter, at a sewing machine right in the store. “Every single project that goes out of here goes out with bags of those pillows and at least five pieces of art,” she notes.

Otherwise, Houston advises clients to depersonalize their residence by hiding family photos and refrigerator art. And there’s no cookware or appliances at Flüff. “When you go to stage a home, people don’t really want to know that they have to work once they get to this house. So I don’t ever put a pot on the stove,” Houston says, adding that the joint can’t be a mausoleum either. “It still has to feel like home, so we put in a lot of depth. It’s the pillows, the big plants—there’s bathrobes in the bathroom and that kind of thing.” For some dramatic before-and-after shots, see www.rentfluff.com/.

What does it cost to stage a home from kitchen to en suite? Houston says the owner of a two bedroom plus den can expect to spend anywhere from $4,000 to $6,000 at Flüff. All rentals are monthly, and if your place doesn’t sell in the first month, there’s a 50-percent discount for the next one. Flüff, which delivers everything by truck and offers a complimentary site consultation, carries enough furniture and accessories for about 18 different homes. Because it’s always coming and going, the abundant inventory isn’t catalogued on-line, so customers must visit to see what’s available. “You can hang out here all day long and pick our brains and talk, and even if you don’t rent, that’s fine,” Houston explains. “A lot of stagers come in just to get inspiration.”

After a good staging, a blank, empty space (below) becomes a welcoming home with accessories, furniture, and plenty of pillows from Flüff.

And how much can a good fluffing add to your selling price? Lots, according to StagedHomes.com, the Web site of Barb Schwarz, who is credited as the inventor of home staging. In a recent survey of 200 U.S. homes, Schwarz’s company found a 6.9-percent average increase in sale price for staged versus non-staged dwellings. Not only that: the staged homes moved 50 percent faster—in 11 days versus 22.

In the current Vancouver real-estate market, where values remain high but sales have slowed, dropping $5,000 or so on one-stop staging sounds like time saved and money well spent. Dana J. Smithers, owner of North Vancouver’s Sun on My Back Redesigns (604-836-7174, www.sunonmybackredesigns.com), rents furnishings from Flüff for her projects, which include staged homes and interior makeovers. Smithers, whose fees range from $150 per hour to $750 or more per day, recommends that clients spend between one and three percent of their asking price to get a home ready for sale. “However, if you have not maintained your house, then you’re looking at about three to five percent,” she cautions.

Or maybe you’d like to get into this line of work yourself. An accredited Canadian ReDesigners Association trainer, Smithers offers a five-day CRDA course covering redesigns of houses and apartments whose occupants are staying put. After two days in the classroom, students accompany her to three client homes for some hands-on experience in literally rearranging the furniture. (Smithers is always seeking training properties for redesigns, and she charges these customers a lower rate of $75 an hour or $150 for the day.) “I’ve never gone back to anyone’s home to change anything, so they’re always delighted with the result,” Smithers says of her crew’s seven-hour transformations. She also teaches a three-day professional real-estate-staging course. Its focus: how to make both a furnished and a vacant home “open house–ready”.

Like Patti Houston, Smithers has a few tips for getting there: clean, declutter, choose hardwood or laminate flooring, avoid heavy drapes, install decent lighting, and disappear tatty-looking furniture. When you’re painting, keep basic colours neutral to give the home broad buyer appeal. Pay special attention to kitchens and bathrooms, because women look at these rooms first. Smithers also preaches letting go of attachments and treating the sale like the business it is. “It’s not about living in that house anymore,” she says. “It’s about selling it.” Can’t think that way? Have a pro do it for you.

Early next year at the Vancouver public library’s Central Branch, Smithers will give a free seminar called How to Sell Your House Sooner and for More Money. (For more info, call 604-331-3602.) As Houston notes, that irresistible proposition becomes even more compelling when you consider how swiftly most open-house visitors make up their minds. “They’re either turned-on or turned-off the moment they open the front door, and so whatever they see, it better impress them,” she says. Sometimes it does pay to rent.

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