As Miami’s luxury real estate market booms, high-end home stagers find a place

A sprawling, newly built mansion on a leafy residential street in Pinecrest had been on the market for several months.

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The home, listed at around $16 million and built by local developer Fouad Kraishan, has massive windows, soaring ceilings and an open floor plan. But Kraishan said the home wasn’t getting offers.

He was showing the house unstaged, without furniture or art.

Empty rooms and blank walls, especially in a large home like the one at 6290 Chapman Field Dr., often leave buyers overwhelmed, wondering how they’ll fill the space and struggling to visualize living there, said Marisa Salas, the South Florida-based chairwoman of the luxury home staging service Showhomes, which has franchises across the country.

Salas and her team brought furniture and artwork into the empty 11,670-square-foot home, and within a few weeks, the house was transformed.

Now, buyers touring the house walk into an entryway staged with two curved, ivory couches facing each other across a coffee table that’s topped with design books and plants. In the dining room, a light wood table is paired with velvety, chocolate brown chairs. The kitchen has bottles of olive oil and jars of pasta to create that lived-in look.

Salas has been staging homes since 2009. The number of homes the Miami franchise of Showhomes has staged has increased each year since then.

Since 2019, a period during which Miami’s luxury market has boomed, the demand for her services has grown, as has the value of the homes she’s staging. The average value has more than doubled from $2.5 million in 2019 to more than $6 million today.

As her business grows, Salas is upgrading to a larger warehouse to store her extensive inventory of couches, lamps, books and other staging supplies.

The rising demand for Salas’ services mirrors broader trends in the region’s high-end real estate market.

Miami-Dade County first saw a spike in luxury buyers during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s experiencing a new wave of even wealthier out-of-state buyers now.

Some attribute this buying frenzy to proposed wealth taxes in states like California that have sent the rich fleeing to lower tax states like Florida. Whatever the cause of the more recent wave, demand for luxury real estate has grown, and home values have skyrocketed since 2019.

As prices for luxury homes have jumped, so have expectations.

That means it’s practically a requirement now to stage a home, said Jennifer McCloskey, the founder and co-CEO of the South Florida-based home staging company All About the Wow.

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McCloskey said when she started her company in 2015, it was uncommon to stage homes in Florida. Back then, she said, home staging was mainly happening in states with more established luxury real estate markets like California.

“There was no knowledge of the value of staging,” McCloskey said.

But with South Florida’s increasingly competitive luxury market, home staging has become a tool for sellers and agents looking to set their properties apart, said McCloskey, who began her career as a real estate broker before getting into home flipping and then home staging. She runs All About the Wow with her sister Geraldine Blakely.

McCloskey said homes can sometimes sell for more after they’ve been staged.

One house her company staged in Palmetto Bay had been listed at $1.7 million for more than 400 days. After staging, the home sold within a week for more than the initial asking price. Another that had been sitting on the market for a year in Coral Gables sold within a day after it was staged.

In the past, McCloskey said some sellers and brokers didn’t want to pay the additional cost of staging a home. “Now people see the value,” she told the Miami Herald during a tour of one of her recently staged properties.

The home, a futuristic mid-century home known as SkyFin, is one of the more unique properties she’s staged. The house, 5261 NE Fifth Ave. in Miami’s Morningside neighborhood, was built by architect Rufus Nims in 1949. It was recently remodeled by architect Gabriela Liebert and is now on the market for about $6 million.

When she was staging the home, which is known in the neighborhood as the “Jetsons House” after the 1960s cartoon sitcom, she wanted to keep its unique design in mind. That meant favoring metals and synthetic materials over classic mid-century finishes like walnut. Throughout the home, she used sleek, neutral furnishings that she accented with colorful pillows, books and artwork.

McCloskey even found a painting of the animated Jetson family to hang over the couch in the upstairs living room. She said she bought it specifically for the Morningside house after stumbling upon it at the Coconut Grove Arts Festival earlier this year.

Staging involves striking a balance between what will make a home pop and what will appeal to most people, McCloskey said. Her company also operates a retail store, called Casawow, selling art and furniture based on what they’ve used to stage homes.

Sometimes home stagers will sell the furniture and decor they used to stage a home to the buyer, but McCloskey said her priority is selling the home, not the furnishings.

Salas said she’s been getting more requests lately to buy the furniture she uses to stage homes. She attributes this to more buyers looking for homes they can move into right away. Working with an interior designer can often take months or even years, and buyers are looking for places that are move-in ready.

On an afternoon in July, a real estate broker was showing Kraishan’s Pinecrest home to a celebrity client, the first showing since the home had been staged. The client and his wife admired the home as they walked through.

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As they were leaving, his wife asked about buying the staging furniture.