If you’re one of those sellers whose house is sitting, not selling, what can you do?

Agents say you have three alternatives: change the price, change the condition, or change both. Sometimes a delay inspires a fourth change: the agent.

Jeff and Chris Shearer chose “all the above” after their 3,100-square-foot house in Plymouth, Minn., brought no offers after 60 days. With a new agent, $3,000 in improvements and a second price reduction, they got an offer in two days.

The new agent was Stephanie Tensing of Edina Realty in Edina, Minn., who is a strong believer in “staging” a home _ fixing obvious and cosmetic problems and rearranging, subtracting or adding furnishings to make the home look spacious and inviting.

The idea isn’t to have buyers see your home, it’s to have them envision it as their home. “When (sellers) have a clear understanding that you’re trying to work with them, not just telling them, that changes their whole attitude and they appreciate it,” Tensing said.

Agent John Prins of Realty House in Minneapolis emphasizes price. “People forget that marketing and merchandising a house is no different than marketing and merchandising any other major consumer good,” he said. “You have to compete with everybody else.”

Staying competitive means paying attention to others’ prices. “As everyone moves their prices around, you have to move with them – and you have to be aggressive and you’ve got to check it on a weekly basis,” he said.

The Shearers’ home featured four bedrooms, 3-1/2 bathrooms, a family room, a finished basement with a fireplace, a screened porch and a sauna. But after dozens of showings and a price reduction, no offers had been made.

“That was very discouraging,” Shearer said. “Our house sits in an area where there’s a lot of woods, and most of the people … said it was too dark. Then we put on every single light every day. My electric bill was $300 a month.”

A year earlier, people down the block with a similar house and similar landscaping had sold for $324,000. So that’s where the Shearers began. “When it didn’t sell after 30 days, we brought the price down to $314,000.”

But it still didn’t sell, and after two months they decided to change agents. Shearer called Tensing.

“She told us some very simple things,” Shearer said. “We had to take out a lot of our furniture, a lot of our knick-knacks, to make it appear more spacious.” Then they removed wallpaper. “I loved it, but it wouldn’t appeal to some people,” she said.

When they had to move, Shearer said, “we left some of our furniture and (Tensing) staged it like a model home.”

Tensing brought in furniture, pillows, artwork, plants, flowers, lamps, bedding and rugs to show the house at its best. Outdated light fixtures were replaced and outdated contact paper removed from drawers.

After changing the Shearers’ house, Tensing put on a full-speed marketing campaign. “I wanted to make sure the Realtors who had shown the home before knew that we’d made necessary changes,” she said.

The house eventually sold for $300,000 _ less than the Shearers wanted, but relieving them of making more house payments after they had already moved.

Prins said people’s expectation of continually increasing prices can get in the way of a sale.

“At any given time in the marketplace, we actually may have (price) deflation,” he said. “It has to do with demand: If the demand isn’t there and you have to sell your house in 30 days, there’s only one thing you can do, and that’s drop the price. The other alternative would be to pull it off the system and rent it and put it back into the system when the buyers come back,” usually in spring.

Tensing said a home “needs to be priced right from day one.”

Realtors say an overpriced home that lingers on the market makes people wonder what’s wrong with it and not even bother to look. Getting a buyer might mean several price reductions, sometimes to less than what the home would have brought if properly priced from the start.

There’s no single answer to how long sellers should wait before making some kind of change. For one thing, it depends on the pace of the market.

Tensing’s rule of thumb is “two weeks or 10 showings.” If changes were made before listing and no offers are arriving, she said, “you have to evaluate what else is going on in the marketplace.”