Staging Is it worth the price?

[riveree]

Originally Posted by mcleanl

My husband and I were recently in Jacksonville looking for homes in the 600k price range. I personally perferred the homes that either had furniture in them or that were staged with furniture. I will confirm what HIF mentioned and that is some empty homes had only the bathrooms and kitchen staged (beautiful towels and bath mats etc) and that alone made a huge difference....it took the "coldness" out of an empty home.

Interesting .

So did the staging help you to visualize your own furniture in its' place? Was it harder to do that in an empty home?

[stevep]

Every home and investment property that we've sold, we've always staged them ourselves. The main reason is that rooms, especially bedrooms, feel smaller when empty and people then can't decide if their furniture will fit. The first time that we staged a property, we did it because of the feedback that we got. We had an average size master that fit a king bed, 2 dressers, nightstand and chair. Once the furniture was moved out and people would look at the room, I'd tell them the amount of furniture that we had in the room and people would look at me as if I was nuts. I then looked at the room empty and tried visualizing all of the furniture in the room and couldn't do it, so we actually rented furniture and staged it. If you're trying to sell a house, you don't want potential buyers to leave your property thinking that the rooms are small. Also, rooms will look smaller depending on the entry location into the room (for ex: if you're entering in the middle of the room vs the end of a room) and also the window locations.