Though the national real estate market is struggling, things are bustling by comparison for some Orange County real estate agents.

They are getting creative with home staging and working hard to find qualified buyers so that deals don’t fall through at closing and sellers are unencumbered by foreclosures or short sales.

What’s not bustling, unfortunately for the market, is sales volume or home prices.

A CNNMoney survey of 27 economists issued on Friday shows most of them expect the market to continue its decline, and it won’t turn around anytime soon. The median forecast from the survey was for a 3.9% fall in the Case-Shiller home price Index in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, and a 2.9% fall in prices over the course of the full year.

The dire outlook aside, a number of real estate professionals say they are having to step over each other when a “good home” comes on the market, as many Orange County buyers are shunning abandoned foreclosures and short sales for occupied homes.

Add to that an excess housing inventory, and it makes an agent’s work all that much harder, said Christine McGowan, who is with Prudential California Realty, the Mulhearn Group.

McGowan, who just stepped down from her role as manager of the group’s Cypress office and went back into sales, teaches classes to a group of between 15 and 30 fellow agents from Prudential each week. What she hears from them is that being agent today sometimes requires twice the work to close a deal.

“I have agents saying they can’t get a house accepted,” she said, noting that on many properties, there are sometimes numerous agents representing clients with competing offers. “They have multiple offers when it’s a good house, and it’s priced right. As a listing agent, they’re getting multiple offers, and as a buyers’ agent, if it’s a decent house, they have a lot of competition for that house.”

What’s driving this trend, according to McGowan, is buyers who are turning away form the abundant short sales and foreclosures that promise to offer buyers a deal in favor of occupied and better-maintained homes when they hit the market.

“Unless they’re investors, they don’t want to have to do the degree of work required on short sales, or foreclosures,” she said, noting that such properties tend to “have a lot of problems with them.”

Expensive fliers, more money for advertisements, hopping aboard the social media circus — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Active Rain — are methods agents are now using to attract buyers for their properties.

Agents are now more often starting to pay professional stagers to help them sell properties, McGowan said.

“It’s nothing like it was back in the day,” she said. “You used to stick a sign on the lawn and put the property on the MLS (multiple listing service).”

Her last property was staged for a cost of roughly a “few thousand dollars,” but she had no option but to pay a staging professional, she said.

The 1,600-square-foot home was sitting vacant on the market, untouched by buyers who were uninterested.

It eventually sold for $552,000, she said. “The cost of staging is going to be much less than what you offer on price reduction,” she said.

McGowan has so much confidence that staging will become a more important part of real estate sales as the market continues to languish that she earned herself a staging certification, so she can now call herself an Accredited Staging Professional. However, she notes, she still plans to use the services of staging professionals for big jobs.

That’s where Carol Streeter comes in.

Streeter owns Model Perfect Staging in Foothill Ranch, and she specializes in the South Orange County market. She’s has recently staged homes in Irvine, and is bidding on few projects in Corona del Mar.

Besides making occupied homes more competitive and giving sellers the courage to boost the asking price, one type of property she’s seeing more staging work from than ever before is the foreclosure.

“It’s very hard to sell a vacant home because people can’t visualize themselves living there,” Streeter said.

She added that staging provides an “emotional connection to the house.”

When staging a vacant home, Streeter is typically tasked with filling the house with furniture, which she said she buys at wholesale, as well as bedding and accessories, such as pictures and plants.

The goal, she said, is “to make a house look decorated as close to you can to a nice model home.”

For example, a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,800-square-foot home requires 50 to 75 individual pieces of furniture and decorations, she said.

That’s a small job. Streeter recently bid to stage a foreclosure in Corona del Mar anticipated to hit the market for $5 million. Her asking price to stage it: $22,000. That’s not even for staging the whole house.

“It’s just the major rooms,” Streeter added.

She said she can’t say exactly how much more a staged home garners from buyers, “but I can tell you one thing, it will get your house sold quicker.”

Got a real estate story to tell? Email DON JERGLER at djergler@gmail.com.