Homes are being sold all the time in all cities and regions. To drive up the costs of real estate people have thought of decorating and staging the place. This brings personal touches to all rooms and help buyers see themselves living in this particular home.
Two exactly the same houses were compared in a study. Results showed that buyers were willing to purchase or submit offers faster for decorated home. Also we found that empty house would be sold 5% – 7% cheaper even though it had exactly same features, rooms and finishing materials.
Imagine walking into empty space and what your first thought would be. Luxury kitchen and modern bathrooms feel extremely empty without proper decoration and staging. It loses the feel of completeness for the home you want to picture yourself living in for many years ahead.
In this article we wanted to explain importance of staging and answer should you decorate your house before selling? Read below our subtopics:
- Benefits of Decorating Home Before Selling
- Cons of Setting up Furniture When Placing on Market
- Associated Costs with Staging Your Home
- How Much Does Decorating Help in Selling
- Who to Hire For Home Decoration
In our shop you can find most of the items for decorating home before selling it. If you are not sure on what to select, contact our team with images and plan of your home and we can help you stage everything without going over budget.
Benefits of Decorating Home Before Selling
More and more homes are not only renovated, but also decorated before put on the market. Here we wanted to separate pros and cons of staging to answer if you should decorate your house before selling in more open way.
Here are the pros:
- Increase the Cost of Sale – there have been studies that decoration of home before selling drives the cost up by several percent. There are only average numbers and it should work for most of properties, but not for everything. Luxury homes should increase the sale way above the costs of hiring decoration team.
- Sell Faster – areas with unsaturated real estate may wish to sell faster. Every day of property stands on market costs seller money. Decorating the place enhances it and give a chance to attract more buyers that can place a bid sooner.
- Hide Some Deficiencies – every residence has minor deficiencies. We do not recommend doing this, but there are home owners who want to hide little problems with decoration items. Scratched floor may be covered with mats or pretty carpet. Uneven or damaged wall can have picture or mirror attached.
- Help Visualize Living Here – by placing furniture and everyday items in house, you help buyers see themselves in action. They will imagine cooking, going to bed and even using bathroom. There is not enough time during the showing to analyze everything and decorating helps to speed up imagination.
Cons of Setting up Furniture When Placing on Market
Improving house with new furniture almost automatically means making it better, but there few exceptions. Although the idea is always to bring positive results and drive up the price or sell faster, it can sometimes hurt the property or be somewhat pointless.
Here are the cons:
- Tough Market for Sellers – spending money and time on decoration during hard times to sell is something home owners want to avoid. There is not much you can do, but regardless of the situation properties may be several month if not years without adequate bids.
- Need Budget for Decoration – another negative point about decorating home before selling is necessary budget. Many times home owners dispose properties due to financial problems or even bankruptcies. On top of all legal costs you need to budget for decorating and staging with designers.
- May not Be Liked by Exact Buyer – whatever you attach to current home for enhancing may not be liked by specific people. Everyone has different preferences and while some absolutely love only luxury styles, others are attracted by modern or other type of decoration.
Associated Costs with Staging Your Home
It is not a secret that to decorate home before selling requires some expenses. But how much do you really need? Remodel On Point describes 5 steps that home owners spend money on during staging.
- Furniture – probably biggest expense during home decoration is getting furniture. Purchasing everything is expensive and people rather rent everything for several months. Extreme way (that we do not recommend) is buying furniture and returning it after the house is sold. Expect to spend $3000 – $5000 for average size home.
- Small items – to finalize decoration process you need small neutral items that bring place to live. Items like face towel, flowers, tooth brushes, silverware and even couch pillows. You may already have beautiful pieces to finish up the process, but to follow the style of staging you can spend $200 – $500 for all these.
- Delivery – where ever decoration items are coming from, make sure delivery is taken care of. Otherwise money will be spent on truck rental or hiring delivery company. The range of costs for delivery is from 0 to $600.
- Hiring professional – with demand for decoration of homes before selling, there professional home stagers became a thing. Hiring one of them to help outsource entire process of staging can cost $1000 – $2000. We recommend spending time on computer and learning how to do it yourself.
- Photography – do not take pictures of house before decorating it. If there is a plan to put additional furniture, wait till it is completed. Good photographers charge $300 – $600 for this work. It includes adjusting all images on specific software before uploading them.
How Much Does Decorating Help in Selling
Why some people claim decorating house does not help sell the home or increase the price while other have only positive things to say about it. We believe most of it has to do with type of the home being staged and how much thoughts are put in the work.
Cheaper properties that are not in great condition have the lowest effect of driving sales with decoration. This can be explained by buyer intentions to either flip property or to find most affordable options. Thus they would not care much for furniture being properly placed throughout the house.
Average cost and size of houses take most of the sales in real estate and see larger benefits with decorating prior to sale. It helps to stand out from all other images buyers look at before even booking the showing. Attracting more potential buyers, increases amount of bids.
Luxury properties these days do not even sell without decoration. Imagine walking into several million dollar place and it’s completely empty. Walls and flooring are boring and customers leave without a thought in their mind.
Another point that increases value of decoration is doing it properly. Simply by adding bunch of furniture and paintings does not help at all. The whole process has to underline all benefits of the house and let buyers fill the gaps of how they envision living here.
Who to Hire For Home Decoration
The process of home decoration is not as simple as it may seem from first time you think about it. There are several steps to it and knowing exactly what to do is a must. For quality work decorators need to have resources and connections where to get all staging items for good price.
- Hire local professional – there are agencies that specialize in decoration for any house, condo and commercial places. They are true professionals and know how to get the maximum for your dollar.
Decoration and staging companies have their own inventory or have partners they work with. They charge for entire process and charge around $10 000 for everything from beginning to end. It is on expensive side but you save a lot of time for selecting everything, delivering and placing it.
- Hire online specialist – another option to get help on distance. Home owners pay $500 – $1000 for consultation and entire break down of what to get and where to get it. Remodel On Point provides decoration packages online for all homes and offices.
The idea is to be involved in the process and save money by not hiring company that includes full package services. Home owners save 20% – 30% by hiring online professionals in decoration and sticking to the list of items to rent and place in their home.
- Do it yourself – the last option we are discussing is decorating everything by yourself. Simply by doing research, home owners can learn about process of decoration. Even placing your own existing decoration is a thing, but does not work as well as new items.
Doing it by yourself will save you some money. You will have to do all the planning and finding where to purchase or rent decorations. Time spent on this work is never worth the money. We recommend either getting online help or hiring local company.
