At the first glance, it may appear counterintuitive to invest in your property when you’re moving out. Well, you’ll probably have to invest a little anyway for repairs. IF you don’t, the property price with drop.
How do you feel about seeing a property for sale that’s completely empty? If you’re one of the few highly imaginative persons, you can easily imagine living yourself inside of it. Most potential buyers are not that imaginative with empty properties.
Therefore, an empty property can sit on the market for quite a while. Home staging sells your property about three times faster. Today, we’ve got two options: traditional home staging and digital staging as an alternative. But which one would be cheaper?
Conventional Home Staging
How much a home stager charges largely depends on where you live and the home stager himself. As a rough guess, you can always take advantage of the gross living standard in your area.
The higher costs of living are in your area, the higher are costs for any service. Consequently, fees for conventional home staging tend to vary as largely. As a national average for the US, conventional home staging does cost about $ 1 per square meter per month.
The monthly fee results in the fact that you’ll need to pay for rental furniture. Moreover, many home stagers only work on three months contracts. Even if your home sold earlier, you’ll still have to pay for a total of three months.
The initial walk-through
Even you manage to find a rather affordable home stager, that person will need to see your home first. Obviously, no home stager does anything for free. He will have to take a look at your home to get an idea of what needs doing.
That initial walk-through can be as low as $200 and can go up to $600 or even more. It depends on what exactly the home stager is doing during this initial walk-through. If he’s only taking a look and presents some ideas for each room, it may remain at about $ 600. But if he does provide you with a plan about re-organizing your existing property, it easily rises to 1 k.
The design plan
After a home stager has seen your property and given you first advice, he will work out a design plan. If you’d like to save some funds, it’d be best to just focus on the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The home stager will choose a neutral design, some decor as well as furniture to make your property more attractive to potential buyers. The design plan will be rather detailed and include where each furniture item would be located. Thus, he’s put quite some work into it and charges about $ 1500 for this step.
The re-design
Even though a plan is worked out, it still needs to be put into practice. This may include painting your walls, which may come to a fee of $ 300. Don’t forget about furniture and decorative items (fluffy inviting towels included for the bathroom). Those are all rentals and need to be brought in from a storage unit. Depending on the quality of the rental items, the monthly cost for them is about $500-600.
Digital Staging
As you’ve seen thus far, conventional staging requires quite a lot of effort. And money. Digital staging, however, is a more affordable alternative. The advantage already lies in the fact that you won’t have to shift around furniture. Moreover, your images will be published on your website or social media anyways. You can as well benefit from simple editing services to make your home more sellable. Everything is done virtually, from renovating to removing clutter as well as adding furniture and decorative touches.
As a rough average cost for staging, you can assume about 1 % of your selling price. That’s fairly low, isn’t it? Neither will you have to pay any monthly fees. Once it is finished, it’s done and ready to go. Of course, there are variations when it comes to costs. Those do mostly depend on how many rooms you’d like to have staged. It also depends on whether there’s furniture to be ‘removed’ or ‘added’.
Benefits of digital staging
A simple staging turns any empty room into a nicely staged one with all the extras. There will be furniture, a neutral wall color, suitable lights, and some decor. You won’t realize it’d be the empty room of your property. In the beginning, photos had a tendency to look fairly artificial.
Times have changed and each room looks as if there was real furniture in your photo. You’ll get a complete package for such low fees of just $ 29 per room. It can certainly get more expensive, it’s your choice how many rooms you’d like to stage. Of course, you’d have the option of creating several styles for one and the same room. No matter how many rooms you choose to style with digital staging, it’s considerably less than conventional staging.
Digital furniture removal and staging
You can probably not wait to leave your home but will still have some furniture left. If you’ve lived rather long in your property, your furniture may not be up to date. That could be a reason why your home won’t sell as fast to the best price. With it, you can remove any furniture you want and stage each room completely.
Even if you already had the first boxes standing around or have not done a decluttering. Anything that’d make your property less attractive to potential buyers will be edited. Once it’s done, you won’t recognize your own home. These services come at an average of $ 39 per room.
Digital Staging Has More Advantages vs Conventional Staging
Digital staging is more affordable and doesn’t result in recurring monthly fees. Also, no spending for removing or adding furniture. Furthermore, no need for crazy decorations. Moreover, no astronomical consultation fees – in fact, there are none. And finally, you can renovate your property while it’s already on the market