The house in Wake Forest should have been an easy sell.

It had a good floor plan, was well made and bordered a greenway. But after four months and more than 50 showings, there were no takers. Not even dropping the price $9,500 brought an offer.

So Leigh Moore, the real estate agent hired to sell the house, brought in a home stager to make it more appealing.

The house sold in five days.

"I'm a convert," said Moore, who in 10 years of selling homes had never hired a stager before this summer. "There was nothing inherently flawed with the house. It was just not capturing the buyers and tugging at their hearts. She just simplified it so the people could come in and see the house, not the lovely decorating."

Home stagers are not interior decorators. In empty houses, a stager's goal is to add just enough furniture to highlight the space. For resales, staging often involves decluttering -- removing the owners' belongings so that potential buyers can tell what the house would look like with their own furniture.

Offering tips to sell homes is hardly new in the real estate industry. For decades, brokers have advised homeowners to remove old rugs and repaint rooms with glaring colors.

But with sales slowing and a growing number of homes on the market, Triangle builders, brokers and homeowners increasingly are turning to home stagers for professional advice to help them sell houses.

In October, resales dropped for the first time in almost four years, while the inventory of homes for sale grew by 6.6 percent, with 14,538 homes on the market, according to the Triangle Multiple Listing Service.

"Even in a fantastic market, using stagers is smart," said Marti Hampton, owner of ReMax Realty One in Raleigh.

"When we have an oversupply market such as we're in, staging is a lot more important ... because the buyer has a lot of choices."

Hampton, who sells about 550 homes a year, hired stagers on 80 percent of her listings this year, four times as many as last year.

Hiring stagers also helps brokers and homeowners compete against major builders, who spend thousands of dollars on model homes to show potential buyers what their homes could look like, Hampton said.

Michelle Kurelich, owner of Lasting Impressions by Michelle, worked mostly on new homes when she started her Raleigh business a year ago. Now, resales are 50 percent of her business. Kurelich said she stages about two homes a week.

The increased demand comes as home staging becomes an industry, much like offering home inspections did 20 years ago. StagedHomes.com, a California company started by Barb Schwarz, offers accreditation courses. In five years, the company has accredited more than 10,000 stagers, including 25 in the Triangle; another 25 have signed up for a three-day course costing $1,850 next month at the North Raleigh Hilton.

Home staging is also getting a push from television. Cable TV shows such as "Buy Me" and "Designed to Sell" show homeowners who are rescued by a quick makeover. Each week, viewers see desperate homeowners living in houses that just won't sell. Then it's less than 30 minutes of new furniture, new paint, and oh heck, let's take out that wall, too. At the show's end, the sold sign is up and the house, we're told, has had multiple offers and went for well over the asking price.

Who wouldn't consider a home stager after that?

Linda Beam, owner of Quick Sale Home Staging, whose handiwork helped sell the Wake Forest house, said that few people were familiar with home staging when she began her business three years ago. But now she does more than a hundred stagings and consultations a year. Consultations -- where she makes room-by-room recommendations -- cost $150 for homes with less than 3,000 square feet. Consultations for homes with 3,000 to 5,000 square feet are $200. The owners are responsible for making the changes.

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."