Home Staging FAQ:
How to Sell Your Home Faster and For Top Dollar

How Much Does Home Staging Cost?

Home staging fees can range from a few hundred dollars for an initial consultation to thousands of dollars to furnish an entire home. It completely depends on:

• The size and current state of your home
• How much of the work you’re willing to do yourself once you have the home stager’s recommendations
• The price point of your home

Higher end furnishings are needed for higher end properties because that’s what buyers in that price bracket expect.

For example, it costs more to furnish a million dollar home than a $175,000 condo, because of the square footage and the calibre of furnishings that will be required to fit your home’s target market.

If your home is already furnished, staging fees may range from $250 to $800 depending on the home stager’s experience and how much needs to be done.

Whether you are paying for the consultation or you’ve negotiated for your Realtor to pay all or part of it, remember that home staging advice is an investment in a potentially significant financial return. Don’t base the choice of stager purely on price, consider who will do the best job.

> Read more about what to expect when you hire a home stager and what effects the costs.

Will Home Staging Increase the List Price of My Home?

Home staging can often boost the asking price for a home. The magnitude of the change depends on what your house looks like now, and what it looks like after staging.

For example, Debra Gould, also known as The Staging Diva, staged a house for a client at a cost of $5,300 (including fees and some rental furnishings). The agent had originally planned to list the home for $749,900.

When she saw it again after staging, she increased the list price to $799,900 (that’s a $50,000 increase in the list price).

The home sold in days with multiple offers for $820,000. That’s an increase of $70,100 after investing only $5,300. From start to finish, the project took two weeks.

How else can you make a 1323% return on your money in 14 days, without breaking the law?

> Learn what to expect when you hire a home stager and how much it costs.

How Does Home Staging Boost The Selling Price of My Home?

Home staging can increase the asking price of your home because you have a much more marketable product that will look better than your competition (especially if many of these homes aren’t staged).

And when you start from a higher asking price, your selling price can be higher too.

Try to think back to the emotional roller coaster you were on when you bought your current home. How you had renewed hope with every listing your agent sent you and then had that hope quickly replaced by disappointment and a feeling that you might never find what you were looking for (at a price you could afford).

House hunting is exhausting! So many awful listings to weed through that don’t nearly live up to the hype in the real estate listing!

In the “old days,” home buyers would have to let their real estate agent drag them through endless showings to sort out the good properties from the bad.

Today, 90% of buyers look at real estate listing photos online before contacting a real estate agent show them a home.

Will your real estate listing measure up?

> Read more about why home staging works.

People shop with logic but they buy with emotion.

If your home looks fantastic online and the prospective buyer can immediately imagine living there, they are more likely to book a showing, and ultimately make an offer.

Home staging creates the “dream home” environment for buyers so they don’t have to use their own imagination and can immediately fall in love and say “this is home!”

There aren’t very many legal ways to triple your investment in a short period of time. Home staging is one of them, as you’ll see in this story!.

In a hot real estate market, home staging helps you sell for more because when enough buyers are bidding on your home, the selling price goes up way past your asking price.

In a slow real estate market home staging is especially critical because you need to do something to motivate a buyer to make an offer.

If the buyer is afraid someone else might buy their “dream home” they will take action. Otherwise, they’ll feel no pressure to buy because there are lots of properties on the market and prices are dropping.

Most buyers can’t look past unattractive or disorganized rooms or figure out how their furniture might look in an empty room.

You are competing with every other home in your price range. If potential buyers are previewing your real estate listing online, they’ll decide within seconds whether to click to the next property, or spend more time considering yours.

Staging Diva® Professional Home Stagers know how to quickly identify the changes that will make the biggest difference in the photos of your property and ultimately in the sale of your home.

> Read these staging success stories for proof home staging works.

My Agent Can Tell Me How to Get My House Ready for Sale. Why Do I Need a Home Stager?

Real estate agents are independent contractors who operate on 100% commission and they have only so many hours in a day!

Every hour they spend inside in your home discussing how to improve it for sale, is another hour they aren’t spending marketing your property!

Besides, they aren’t going to make any more commission by spending more time and money on your property. So to be totally frank, they make more profit by spending less time and money on your listing, while still getting the basic job done.

Many Realtors® suggest obvious repairs, cleaning and decluttering. The kind of things you can do yourself based on these Top 10 Home Staging Tips.

However, your real estate agent won’t spend hours deciding on the best place for every piece of furniture or accessory in your home (nor should they).

Not to mention sourcing all the additional items you might need to present your property as if it were a “model home”! That would be a real drain on their time and give them too many details to worry about when they should be focussed on promoting your listing.

Your Realtor may recommend a painter. But are they the best people to recommend home staging paint colors?

If you have a vacant home, do they know how to get it fully furnished and looking its best?

What if your furniture is really dated? Your agent may be reluctant to tell you it has to be replaced.

They also may not tell you to put away your treasured family photos or collection of decorative plates and figurines because they don’t want to offend you and risk losing your real estate listing.

Staging Diva® Professional Home Stagers are ready to deal with all of these issues quickly and diplomatically, while letting your Realtor focus their time and energy on what they’re uniquely qualified to do— marketing and selling your property.

If I Need Home Staging, Shouldn’t My Real Estate Agent Pay for It?

The short answer is “No, your Realtor isn’t obligated to pay for home staging just because you’re listing with them.”

Many agents just refer their clients to home stagers, in much the same way as they would recommend a painter, handyman, home inspector or real estate lawyer. You don’t expect them to pay those fees so why would home staging be any different?

> How much home staging costs

Some real estate agents will pay for an initial consultation with a home stager for their high-end listings. Others will reimburse the home seller for a portion of the fees after they’ve collected their commission. This way you’ve made the upfront investment (so they know you’re serious about selling), and after the sale, they’ll repay you for your home staging out of the commission they earned selling your home.

Real estate agents have an incentive to sell your home for more money, because they earn a percentage of your selling price. If your listing is at a higher price point, you have more negotiating room to convince your agent to invest more in selling your property fast and for top dollar. That could include paying for home staging, repairs, cleaning, etc.

For example, when Debra Gould The Staging Diva® was selling a recent home, she negotiated for her listing agent to pay the cost of repainting the deck and storing excess items offsite while her property was on the market. Not all agents were willing to do that.

No matter who pays for it, home staging is an essential part of selling quickly and for top dollar.

Don’t let the cost of staging be what stands between you and hiring the right real estate agent. There are many qualities to look for when choosing an agent.

How to find a professional home stager

If you can’t find a home stager in our Directory of Home Stagers, you can use our FREE Home Stager Locator Service.

We’ll gladly locate a Staging Diva® Professional Home Stager for you at no cost.

The Real Estate Market is Hot. Why Should I Bother with Home Staging?

While it’s true that in a seller’s market it sometimes feels like all you have to do is stick a For Sale sign on the front lawn and the house will sell.

Yet, not all properties sell fast, even in a hot market. There are always the listings that languish on the real estate market while everything else sells.

Even if your home shows relatively well (and will sell regardless of what you do), if you can generate a bidding war by decorating your home to look better than anything else for sale in your price range, the multiple offers you receive can go WAY up in price!

Home staging makes it that much easier for bidding wars and back up offers to happen.

> Read more about why home staging works.

Can Home Staging Help Me Sell in a Slow Real Estate Market?

CNN Money did a story on 5 strategies homeowners can use to get top dollar in a slow real estate market.

Real estate staging was the top strategy and they interviewed home staging expert Debra Gould, also known as The Staging Diva® to explain why.

The slower the real estate market, the harder you have to work to attract the interest of potential home buyers.

Anything you can do to get a competitive edge over comparable listings in your area will make selling easier.

Imagine if you were selling your used car. You wouldn’t just put it on the market without detailing it first. You know instinctively that the better and more well-cared for the car looks, the easier it is to sell.

The same is true of what’s likely your single largest asset.

Don’t you owe it to yourself to do what you can to ensure your property looks better than the competition in your area and price point?

When your home doesn’t sell within the first month, your agent will request that you lower your asking price.

Even on a modest home listed in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, each price reduction will be at least $10,000.

Even $10,000 is higher than what you’d likely spend on home staging. See Costs of Home Staging here.

On a listing in the $600,000 and up range, you’ll be looking at price cuts of at least $50,000 to attract a new group of potential buyers.

That’s significant money right out of your pocket!

By staging your property to be as physically attractive as possible, you are romancing real estate buyers and lowering the chances of needing a price reduction.

Wouldn’t it be great to sell faster and potentially get competing offers because your listing looks so much better than everything else listed in the same price range in that neighborhood?

> Read more about why home staging works.

I Can Clean and Declutter, Why do I Need a Home Stager?

It’s incredibly difficult to view your own home with the eyes of a highly critical buyer.

You’re emotionally involved in your home and the contents so it’s hard to be completely objective. It’s hard to see your collection of beloved family photos the way a stranger will when they’re trying to imagine themselves living in your home.

You’ve been living there so long there are many things you don’t even see anymore.

Have you stopped noticing that really ugly wallpaper in the kitchen? Have you become used to tripping on the large carpet wrinkle running down the center of your living room? Did you stop caring that your bed looks like it belongs to the dog or your kids?

You don’t necessarily have the designer’s eye that a home stager will. Plus, you may not have the time or patience to deal with all the details that need to be attended to before you put your home on the real estate market.

Just the idea of moving can be overwhelming. It’s natural to want to pretend everything is OK the way it is, because you have no idea how to deal with it otherwise.

Home staging usually goes beyond cleaning and decluttering and into decorating and rearranging furniture, art and accessories.

A Staging Diva® Professional Home Stager will objectively assess how best to use what you already have, and determine if anything else needs to be added.

> Learn what to expect when you hire a home stager and how much it costs.

Do I Have to Do Anything Before the Home Stager Arrives?

A Staging Diva® Professional Home Stager can look past your clutter and any other problems. So technically, you don’t need to do anything to prepare for the stager’s arrival.

On the other hand, in the same way that you’d get better value from a cleaning service if you picked up all the clothes from your kids’ floors and put away all the papers and clutter around the house before they came to clean, you’ll get the best value out of your home staging consultation if you take care of some simple things before their arrival.

> Read 10 home staging tips to prepare for your home staging consultation.

With that time freed up the home stager can focus all of their home staging consultation time on “next level” improvements. The things that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself rather than using your time together talking about the simpler problems that you can address on your own.

Another quick tip, if you think some of your rooms may need to be repainted it would be best to replace any burned out light bulbs and increase the wattage of bulbs where possible before the home stager’s visit. That’s because it’s best to choose paint colors in the proper light.

A Staging Diva® Professional Home Stager knows exactly which changes will make the most significant difference in your selling price and will give you a priority list of recommendations. You can take this “to do” list and do everything yourself. Or, they can implement all the changes on your behalf. It’s entirely up to you.

> Read more about what to expect when you hire a home stager.

Will the Home Stager Make me Repaint?

Repainting may be recommended, but it’s up to you whether you want to act on that advice. Not all homes need to be repainted before going on the market.

It all depends on how fresh the current paint looks, whether the walls can be cleaned or touched up, the price point of your home, and what the current colors are.

While it can feel like a “waste of money” investing in painting a home you’re selling, if it makes a significant difference in the selling price of your home, it is more than worth it.

Take this example of an outdated kitchen that was totally transformed with paint and lighting. All the cabinetry, floor, appliances and furniture are the same. Yet, here the stager took the home from one where buyers would have thought, “I have to rip out the kitchen and renovating it will be at least $50,000 and months of inconvenience” to “This kitchen is quite nice, I don’t have to do anything to it!” You can image how much such thinking would effect the offer and sale price!

What if My House is Empty?

Selling an empty home is a bad idea. Buyers have great difficulty envisioning how their furniture should be arranged and they have no sense of how big the rooms are with no point of reference.

Vacant homes tend to look depressing. They also lead potential buyers to imagine that you must be desperate to sell (resulting in lower offers).

When a house is vacant, it draws attention to every possible construction flaw or defect since there’s nothing else to look at. Do you have cracked or bumpy walls, damaged carpets, broken tiles? If you also have no furniture, potential buyers will become fixated on all these problems!

It’s hard for buyers to make an emotional connection with an empty house. That’s why builders use model homes and why the model suites in condo buildings tend to sell first.

> Read how home staging establishes that emotional connection.

> This vacant home sat on the market for 5 years and sold the first weekend after staging.

How Do I Find a Home Stager in My Area?

We get inquiries from all over the world and have a database of thousands of excellent home stagers.

They operate their own home staging businesses so you have to contact them directly to review their home staging portfolios and ask about fees and services.

Start with a phone interview. Here are some things to listen for:

• Do I feel comfortable speaking with this home stager?

• Does the stager seem to understand my needs?

• Do they sound confident and interested in my project?

• Does the home stager come well-recommended or does their staging portfolio suggest that they know what to do?

• Is the stager clear when explaining how he/she works and the fees?

• Is the home stager available when I need them?

As with any service business, make sure you feel comfortable with the home stager you decide to hire. You should expect to pay for a home staging consultation during which you’ll learn everything that needs to be done in your home.

If you don’t know any home stagers and your Realtor can’t recommend someone, you’ll find help in our Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers. You can also use our FREE Home Stager Locator Service.

We’ll gladly locate someone for you from our worldwide network of Staging Diva® Professional Home Stagers.

How Do I Become a Home Stager?

If you have decorating talent, Staging Diva can show you how to make money from it through home staging, interior redesign and color consulting services.

As a Staging Diva® Professional Home Stager, you’ll have a complete step-by-step business model to follow that covers all the basics from getting started to growing a thriving business.

Many home stagers start on the side of a full-time job, or while raising their kids— others turn it into a full-time career. It’s entirely up to you!

> Learn more about the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program.

> Read our FAQ for aspiring home stagers about the business of home staging.