I have a townhome and need to have it sold ASAP. How much would a stager normally cost? Do they charge by hour
I have a townhome and need to have it sold ASAP. How much would a stager normally cost? Do they charge by hours or by projects? Please advise.
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My contact info is at www.idesignintl.com or email me at JIICEO@AOL.COM
We did this when we put our 3 bedroom home up for sale. We cleared out everything to a self storage facility, painted the entire house and did a super clean from top to bottom. The homes in our area were on the market for an average of 30-45 days before an offer was made. We sold ours in 4 days!
Odd, but the rooms above appear to have been professionally staged!
I was wondering how you hoped to improve on it!
lol
I think that if you hire a pro to stage your house using your furniture but buying accessories for you (or giving you a list from which to shop), hourly would be the fairest way to go. Designers in SF charge anywhere from $50-$200+/hour.
Occupied homes preparing to sell should start with a staging consultation, often paid for by the realtor, so it's well worth it to find a realtor who believes in staging & hires a stager for every listing. A staging consultation generally takes (+/-) 2 hours, so ~ $200 to find out what to declutter, how to rearrange your furniture, what to fix & clean & paint, what items to buy/rent to complete a show home look. It can involve weeks of homework for the homeowner to get the home show-worthy.
Vacant homes usually require a site visit by the stager to do a proper estimate on staging costs and furniture rentals. Site visits and estimates are usually free of charge and then the project is charged out as a package price. Not every room is necessarily staged, depending on budget, so almost any budget can be accommodated by staging priority rooms rather than the entire home. My staging costs generally range from $1,800 - $5,000 and even up to $12,000 for high end luxury homes. This cost is usually for the first month only, which covers design planning, sourcing furniture & accessories, coordinating all aspects of the job, installation & design labor, & all moving costs. After month #1 there's a significant discount for furniture rentals only, usually ranging from 50-65% off.
I understand the rationale behind stagers charging a percentage of the home's price. Some stagers have worked out their pricing formulas so well that they can predict & estimate staging costs based on the price of the home or the square footage of the home. This is an extremely efficient method of estimating and I could save myself a month or more of detailed estimating time over the course of a year if I could use a formula that would work consistently 95% of the time.
In the end, you usually pay for what you get. A bedroom with a blow up bed & bedding is what I call "barely there" staging. Kind of like shopping at bargain basement discount stores... it's there but not very inspiring or exciting. Then there's quality furniture & expert color and design expertise that creates a dreamy show home and elevates BUYER DESIRE so potential buyers can hardly resist putting in an offer. Now that's effective staging because some expert stagers have learned color & marketing psychology, not just decorating techniques!
Does that clarify some of your questions about the staging industry?
Here's a Before & After of a very humble townhouse that sold in 1 day for $13,000 over asking price after I staged it.
Everything looks so beautiful and settled and ready to move in, and even if some stuff is not your style people would always ask if they could have some of the furniture with it.
But in the end what sells your house is what other people is willing to pay and you willing to accept, we ended up going for a empty house to buy, but furniture placement in it would have helped immensely on our future layout and so on.
I would advise that go for a staging company with a flat p.h rate, and request a quote for the services, like the shopping list and maybe some lighting schemes, its all a quotation and there are no strings attached.
I do believe you can stage your house yourself but just to some amount, never expect to have exactly what you see on photos, because those were worked on by people who are professionals, worked many years on the trade and it shows.
Some tips:
-Uncluttered spaces always seems lighter and brighter
-Move the furniture around until you find where it looks best
-Great Lighting makes anything look better, increase the wattage in your lamps and fixtures. Aim for a total of 100 watts for each 50 square feet.
-Neutral colours for furniture, or on the walls.
-Flowers and some green potted plants(medium sized, but not huge)
Just be true to yourself and appreciate your own work if you end up doing it by yourself, because its great.