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For empty houses, Beam will bring in vanloads of furniture at a rate of $40 an hour. She keeps a storage building filled with dozens of pictures, candleholders, lamps, tables, chairs and mirrors worth $30,000 to use in stagings.

"It just makes sense," she said. "You detail your car before you sell it. When you put your home on the market, you make it look its best so it appeals to the broadest range of buyers."

Decluttering a home is often the hardest. Owners don't like being told to remove their prized possessions. Kurelich had one client who shut herself in a closet for six hours because she couldn't watch. The owner of the Wake Forest home broke into tears when 20 percent of her furniture was removed, Beam said.

But home stagers and the brokers who use them say the effort and the cost are worth it. StagedHomes.com claims that homes that have use a stager sell for an average of 6.9 percent more than nonstaged homes and stay on the market 50 percent fewer days.

Anitra Todd, a broker for Northside Realty who has sold homes for 20 years, began using stagers two years ago. She said buyers start their searches looking at photos on the Internet and "staging helps, because a room that's empty doesn't look very good [online], and a room that's ugly doesn't look very good."

Still, not all brokers are sold on stagers. Jill Flink, a top seller for York Simpson Underwood in Raleigh, said her design recommendations are enough to sell homes, and she doesn't think it's worth the cost to sellers.

"I was an artist before I was a Realtor and [the cost] is more than I've found the need to ask my sellers to do," said Flink, who for years owned the Jill Flink Fine Art gallery in Raleigh's Cameron Village.

But Beam said her job is to make recommendations that brokers can't. On one consultation, Beam wrote that in a daughter's bedroom "the neon pink is the most glaring offense."

"If they've got bad wallpaper, I tell them to take it out. If they've got bad colors, I tell them to paint," Beam said. "Their [broker's] job is to sell the house. I'm the one that gives them the bad news."

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