by Carolyn Beeler, NPR Morning Edition

Bill Worthington calls himself a human prop. He seems more like an enthusiastic tour guide. Worthington is walking around his $1.5 million Princeton, N.J., home, like a proud owner.

"Look around the kitchen here," Worthington says. "It's essentially a brand-new kitchen, with high-end appliances, brand-new cabinetry ..."

But he doesn't own the place, or even know the owner. He was hired as a "house manager" to live in the property. He moved in with his own furniture and bought some new items to fill out the expansive white brick colonial. He pays a monthly fee of $1,500 to live in the house, a fraction of what the mortgage or rent on the property would be.

"I'm living high on the hog for not a lot of money," he says.

The catch: He has to keep it immaculate. The house must be ready to show prospective buyers at a moment's notice. He can't leave any toothbrushes out in the bathroom, shoes in the entryway, or dishes waiting to be washed in the sink.

Worthington was hired by the Princeton, N.J., branch of Showhomes, a national home staging company. "Home staging" — or furnishing and decorating a home to help sell it — has been around for decades. But with home sellers facing a dismal housing market, they're going the extra mile to make their homes stand out in the crowd. That includes hiring house managers like Worthington to give homes a lived-in feel.

A New Routine

Every morning as soon as Worthington wakes up, he makes his bed so it looks like it belongs in a hotel. He tucks the sheets in nice and tight, straightens the off-white comforter, and replaces the decorative throw pillows he tossed on a chair the night before.

"I'm not a real good Suzy Homekeeper," Worthington says, "so it takes me maybe 10 minutes of staggering around here half-awake."

In addition to keeping the place clean, Worthington must decorate the house to help other people visualize how they could live there. That means he can't hang any political or religious artwork and can't have many personal photos. And if a buyer wants the house, Worthington has to pack up his things and move out.

The owner of the house approached Carla and Jon Cheifetz, the husband-and-wife duo who run the Princeton franchise of Showhomes, after the home had been sitting on the market for three years. The company operates under the assumption that lived-in houses sell for more than empty ones. Even if a house is nicely staged, Carla Cheifetz says, buyers can tell no one lives there, and that hurts the sellers.

"The prospective buyer will know that the house is vacant, because there is no food in the refrigerator," Cheifetz says. "There's no clothes in the closet, so therefore what happens is they will lowball offers because they feel that the owner might be struggling because they may have two mortgages."

Staging On The Rise

Nationally, Showhomes says it has about a third more homes in the system than this time last year. There aren't statistics on whether having someone live in a home makes it sell faster. But it is generally accepted by real estate agents that traditionally staging a house — adding furniture and decorations — does help move a property faster.

Koki Adasi-Efuya, a Realtor in Washington, D.C., says he saw home staging increase among his clients when the housing market hit the skids. "I saw the big jump probably around 2007, 2008," Adasi-Efuya says. "Inventory, you know, kept increasing and people saw that it was getting harder to sell the house, so they started to think of other creative ways to make the property sell."

For many sellers, those ways include traditional staging and its newer cousin — virtual staging. It's at the opposite end of the real estate spectrum from hiring a live-in stager. A company will use a photo-editing program like Photoshop to add furniture and decorations to images that can be posted online. The idea is to help buyers visualize what the house could look like if they moved in. But it's controversial.

"It's fine to show window treatments and furniture in a room to kind of give it perspective," says Walter Maloney, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors. Adding furnishings can help buyers make informed decisions. "But if you go beyond that to the extent of, for example, Photoshopping in a chandelier that isn't there, or changing the exterior view from a building to trees, then that is misrepresentation."

He says any misrepresentation or any covering up of defects such as moldy walls and leaky basements is a violation of the Realtors' code of ethics.

Adasi-Efuya says some of his buyers use photo editing programs to help them picture how a new home would look furnished. They add furniture, virtually knock down a wall, or change paint colors. But he doesn't recommend virtual staging for his sellers. While it can be much more affordable than traditional staging, touched-up online houses can more easily create disappointed house hunters when they see the real thing.