Every house tells a story

They had heard of the soft sell, but when David Brooks and his wife, Maureen Killian, went house-hunting on Cape Cod 18 months ago, they encountered a nonchalance on the part of professional home sellers that astonished them.

One agent, in shorts and sandals, lazily unfurled a property description that still makes Mr. Brooks laugh. "It's a cape on the Cape," Brooks remembers the agent saying. "Three bedrooms, like everything else around here."

The New Jersey couple shuffled through that house and several others, sizing up each one as a prospective summer getaway to which they could eventually retire. Tedium began to set in.

Then they met Diana Flink. Ms. Flink was the listing agent on a four-bedroom house in Harwich, Mass. Born in England and with a background in professional theater, Flink displayed a rather different approach to sales.

"I started peppering her with questions," recalls Brooks. "And she put her hand up and just said: 'All in due time. Let me present it to you as it ought to be presented.' " Flink waltzed them around, pointing out the various room shapes, weaving in stories about the home's builder and first occupant. Her stylish presentation was laced with color. Flink showed them the "hidy hole," for example, where the builder's daughter once hid her diary from a nosy brother.

"I didn't think I wanted a lot of backstory," Brooks says. "But it was pretty effective. In my mind a house speaks for itself, but she just put it in its absolute best light." The couple bought the house.

Storytelling - long a factor in many forms of selling - appears to be gaining as a tactic for getting an edge in the crowded field of residential real estate sales. Story-based home selling is most common toward the upper end of the price spectrum, a very active segment. (Coldwell Banker recently reported luxury-home sales up 23 percent in 2003 over the previous year, to $23.3 billion.) And it takes predictable regional twists: In southern California, for example, anecdotal links to celebrities are prized. But signs of real estate agents and private sellers trying some form of the practice appear at most levels and in every major region of the United States - with some in the business now making formal presentations of a home's story an integral part of the sell.

Forget "home staging," where firms swoop in, redecorate, and put some potpourri on the stove to boil. Forget "undecorating" to give prospective buyers a blank slate. And forget boilerplate bed-and-bath counts. As another home-selling season revs up for its run toward a late-summer peak, the sales may be in the tales. And even a midsize suburban tract house can have the makings of a good yarn.

"It's always possible," says Stan Barron, a real estate broker in Austin, Texas, who spends seven to 10 days researching a house before compiling an illustrated report to present to prospective buyers.

"That's the nice thing about marketing houses, as opposed to toothpaste," says Mr. Barron, a self-proclaimed fan of the David Ogilvy school of advertising, where stories add mystique. "There's almost always some little angle you can come up with. I'm looking for that story appeal from Day 1."

Some brokers eye angles with narrow appeal. Alisann Smookler, a broker with Keller Williams Southwest Realty in Scottsdale, Ariz., is now listing a traditional adobe house in nearby Fountain Hills. [Editor's note: The original version failed to state the full name of the realty.]

"This home is owned by a nationally known psychic," Ms. Smookler says, "so I took the bold move of marketing it as such, knowing this may deter some people from even walking into it."

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