David and Rachel Hill were spooked by the rocky economy in early 2008, shortly after they married and merged their families.

So rather than buying a modest little starter home, they moved with their kids into a nine-bed, seven-bath house in a toney area of Salt Lake City’s north side.

An extravagant throwback to the boom times?

Hardly. In fact, just the opposite.

David, a freelance publicist, and Rachel, a high school chemistry teacher, are effectively rented renters, placed in the gigantic home at a steeply reduced rate to keep it looking pretty and lived-in until the $800,000 listing finds a buyer.

They are among the hundreds of tenants in nine cities who have signed on with three-year-old Designer HomeTending, a Boise, Idaho-based business that has boomed through the real estate bust by merging the interests of economically snake-bitten renters with home sellers desperate to make their vacant properties stand out from the crowd.

Business model based on tenant fees

The business model is fairly simple. Home sellers agree to let Designer HomeTending place tenants in their homes but do not receive or pay money to the company. Designer HomeTending makes money by charging the tenants a fee, about $625 a month on average, roughly equivalent to the rent on a typical studio apartment, according to founder and CEO Cathy Cardenas. A professional home stager arranges the home’s interior using the tenant’s own furniture.

The tenants pay the utility bills and take care of the landscaping. They agree to keep the home in showing condition at all times and to get out of the house when agents show it to potential buyers. And they must pack up and move promptly once the home sells.

From the home seller’s point of view, the hope is that a well-staged, occupied home will sell faster than an empty hulk. Plus, the seller gets free home staging and maintenance while waiting for the market to turn.

There is some evidence that staging alone can speed home sales.

Members of the Real Estate Staging Association, an industry group, surveyed a collection of vacant, unstaged homes in various markets in January 2007 and February 2008. The homes had been on the market an average of 131 days by January 2007 and 191 days by February 2008, according to the group’s study. The same homes, pulled from the market, staged, then remarketed, sold in an average of 42 days in 2007 and 28 days in 2008.

In short: Staged homes in the survey spent 68 percent less time on the market in 2007 and 85 percent less time in 2008.

Combining staging with actual living, breathing residents can make a home shine even brighter, said Andy Weiser, a Fort Lauderdale agent whose sales put him in Coldwell Banker’s top 1 percent worldwide last year.

“Having a house that somebody’s living in gives you the little things,” Weiser said. “A newspaper left by the side door — something like that — it just makes it feel like somebody can imagine living there rather than moving into a model room in a department store.”

That is, if the tenants are good.

Designer HomeTending checks references on its tenants but doesn’t rely heavily on some traditional renter screens, like credit checks, to weed its applicant pool, Cardenas said. A large portion of its tenant prospects are attracted to the home-tending program because they are trying to bounce back from credit-killing events like a divorce, a job loss or a foreclosure, and the need to save on rent.

Home stager works with residents

Instead, the company’s local home stager inspects each applicant’s furniture to make sure it’s up to par for the types of homes they’ll move into. And every applicant goes through a rigorous orientation to learn the dos and don’ts of keeping a home in tip-top showing condition.

For example: Don’t leave the family toothbrushes out when a showing is about to occur. Do turn on all the lights so every room is lit to maximum effect. Oh, and no pets or smoking unless the homeowner specifically allows it.

The staff of three or four employees in each market conducts unannounced inspections of each home at least once a week.

“We understand that people live in the house, too, so it’s not like you can’t ever cook in there or do anything,” Cardenas said. “But they know they have to have it picked up all the time. So if somebody’s not doing a good job, we’ll see it when we go in there.”