Selling your house? Your broker may recommend staging it, which usually means winnowing down the furniture and accessories to a well-chosen few, artfully highlighting your home’s selling points, and neutralizing paint and personal touches so buyers can imagine it as theirs.

Most agents and staging professionals say that staged homes sell more quickly, but with so many factors that go into buying a home, it’s hard to quantify. Agents maintain that staging can help a home stand out at a time when some houses sit unsold for long periods,

“Staging a home is more important in a slower market. You’re competing with more properties, and if your home doesn’t present well in the photos, people will click right by,” said Adrian Hunnings, president of the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors.

Stagers can consult with a homeowner for two or three hours and offer a written report for $150 to $375, allowing homeowners to make the improvements themselves. For homes that require more work, the stager can do the heavy lifting by bringing in rugs, hanging art, repainting walls and fixing landscaping. Those services can cost up to a couple of thousand dollars per month.

Lawyer Raquel Rodriguez said she was initially hesitant to hire a staging professional to help sell her condominium in downtown Washington D.C. last year. But with a tenant living in her condo, no buyers materialized for two months. Once the tenant moved out, Rodriguez’s agent, Mary Lowry Smith of Coldwell Banker, picked up about a quarter of the $2,000 staging and furniture rental fee to make the home “warm and memorable and give prospective buyers a vision for my open floor plan. I appreciated it right away when she explained the concept,” Rodriguez said.

With several other properties for sale nearby, Rodriguez wanted to show her 1,250-square-foot unit at its best. She got two offers and sold 34 days after staging her home for the list price of $465,000. “It sold faster than it otherwise would have and faster than other properties at the time,” she said. “Staging it made the difference.”

According to the HomeGain 2011 Home Improvement National Survey of real estate agents, even do-it-yourself staging can bring a $1,500 to $2,000 payback in the sales price.

But there can be drawbacks. D.C. broker Bill Sawyer said there is such a thing as too much staging: One seller spent $16,000 staging every room elaborately. After the home didn’t sell, the seller gave up, removed the furniture and decor, and sold the place two weeks later, empty.

Basic staging “brings some emotion back to the process, which helps bump the price up,” said Sawyer, of William Sawyer & Co. Realtors. “No need to go overboard with table settings.”

We asked real estate agents and staging professionals for tips and tactics to improve properties with the most need for staging.

VACANT

“Empty always looks smaller,” Sawyer said.

“Empty rooms look cold,” said Smith, Rodriguez’s agent.

“In an empty room, a photo shows a corner and a window. You can’t see the size or what might fit there,” said Sandy Gardner, president of the Northern Virginia chapter of the American Society of Home Stagers and Remodelers.

If stagers don’t have a stash to draw from, they’ll rent furniture and accessories, which can run $750 to $2,400 a month, said Alex Atkin of Decor Decorum.