Selling your home is difficult at the best of times. These days, it comes with a whole host of new challenges to keep up with. Whether to stage or leave your home as is when selling is always a tough call. While we can’t tell you definitively one way or the other, we can give you some pros and cons and general best practices to help empower and inform you enough so you can be in the best position to make the call that works for you. To stage or not to stage, that is the question? Now let’s look at some answers.
The Pros Of Staging Your Home
Let’s start by looking on the bright side, shall we? Staging your home can have a lot of benefits, some of which are fairly intangible, but others are in the form of real dollars and cents. Typically, staged homes sell for a higher price than an unstaged home and they can sell faster, which allows you to move on and get paid more quickly. Here are some other pros to consider when deciding whether or not to stage.
Can sell faster and for more money
As mentioned above, these are two very compelling reasons to have your home staged.
Takes a lot of hassle off of your plate
Staging your home can enable you to concentrate on getting your family moved quickly and without having to worry about cleaning, decorating, and maintaining two homes as you transition into your new home and attempt to sell your old one.
Staging experts are typically really good at what they do
Yes, we can all probably put together a superbly staged home given enough time and resources, but do you really want to be doing that on your own when you have so much else going on? A professional home stager can do a much better job than we can by ourselves and get better results in the same timeframe.
The Cons Of Staging Your Home
Staging your home can definitely have some benefits, but is it always necessary? Yes, getting snow tires for your car is probably a good idea, but if it only snows once a year in your area, is it really worth it? Same goes with staging. If your real estate market is white hot like a lot of the markets across the U.S. these days, then will staging your home really reap that much of a benefit when your home will most likely sell within 48 hours of putting the listing up? Here are some more cons to think of.
It may not be necessary
In many markets these days, many homes are being bought sight unseen and with competing cash offers. When you don’t have to take extra steps to entice a buyer, then staging might be an easily trimmed expense.
It can be cost prohibitive
Yes, staging your home can generally help the bottom line of your sale, but it would have to be by a pretty significant percentage, once everything is said and done. It can cost around $500 for the initial consultation and an additional $500 per month for each staged room. That can add up to thousands of extra dollars out of your pocket in order to sell your home. If your home only goes for a few thousand more than asking or your initial projections, then you essentially made no profit.
There is no guarantee that the buyer will like the style of the staged home
Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and if your buyers aren’t vibing with the final product of the staged home, then all of your time and effort was for naught. Staging can definitely help, but it is not guaranteed to match up with every buyer every time.
In Conclusion
Whether your stage or not, there really is no right or wrong answer as each home and each market is unique. Ed Elam is happy to help with any questions about staging and beyond! Give him a call today, he’d love to hear from you.