Should You Stage Your South Florida Home?

Should You Stage Your South Florida Home?

Selling your home is a delicate process. The decisions you make, like choosing your real estate agent and pricing your property, greatly impact how much you take home from the sale. One of these decisions you’ll need to consider with your agent is whether or not to stage your home for sale.

The goal of staging is to shorten the time your property stays on the market and increase your sale price. However, these benefits don’t always pay for themselves.

While the right choice for you will depend on a number of factors, here are some things to keep in mind when considering if you should stage your South Florida home.

What Is Staging?

Staging involves decorating your home to help give buyers an idea of how different spaces can be used. You might add beds, tables, couches, entertainment centers, or any other common household features to help buyers visualize themselves living there instead of relying on their imagination. Depending on your budget, you can consider virtual or physical staging.

Virtual staging is done with computer programs that can create and place furniture in a recreation of your home without the need to rent or buy furniture. These photos are used to upgrade the online listing to increase the interest in your property.

Physical staging generally involves a designer and requires real furniture that’s placed in your home. It can be existing furniture you already have, rented furniture specifically for the staging, or purchased pieces that you plan to bring to your new home. Physical staging can be used for both your online listing and to help buyers see the potential of your property when they’re touring.

When Should You Stage Your Home?

Staging is a way to add additional value to your home and make it stand out. Nearly two-thirds of realtors see an average return of about 7% when staging properties. Staging also reduces the property’s time on the market by as much as 50%.

Virtual staging is much cheaper than physical staging and is usually a good idea for most home values.

You should physically stage your property if your home sale is time-sensitive. It will help you sell faster because your property will stick out from the other unfurnished or unstaged properties, allowing buyers to see themselves in your home. In competitive markets like South Florida, staging can make the difference between weeks and months on the market.

Staging is also a good idea for higher-value properties like luxury homes. In high-value homes that aren’t large, staging can be a low-cost option for adding a significant return on your list price. It’s also worthwhile for larger, high-value homes, it just might not provide as high of a return.

However, staging can get expensive. In many cases, staging costs between $500 to $3000 for a staging professional, furniture rentals, and other costs associated with staging. This cost can be prohibitive for smaller properties that don’t benefit from the up to 7% value increase or those without the money to invest in staging.

Let Great Florida Homes Maximize Your Home’s Sale Value

Deciding whether you should stage your home is one of the many decisions that your real estate agent can help you with.

At Great Florida Homes, our team has the market knowledge and experience to determine whether staging is right for you. We work to sell your home for the highest price and as quickly as possible, using all of the best tools to make the selling experience successful.

Get in touch with us today.