Looking for Staging in the Baltimore area

[Damien Clark]

So my first flip is coming along and looking to list in a few days. Does anyone know of any reasonable staging companies that service the Glen Burnie area? ARV is 210k-220k should I even bother to stage?

Damien

[J Scott]

Originally posted by @Account Closed:

Save your money. Staging helps but how much really? What your attempting to do is convince someone spending 220 to buy yours over another. I feel staging is an expense better saved for ridiculous houses that require vision to know what a room can become. A 220 in glen burnie, more than likely, isn't one of those houses though a staging company would attempt to convince you otherwise. Look at your comps and see what they've done, call them even.

Personally, I disagree with this. We've staged every house we've ever sold, including many in the $90-100K price range. The feedback we get is consistently along the lines of, "Wow, this house looks amazing...my client fell in love with it the minute she walked in the door."

While I'd like to say that the renovation gets the credit for those types of comments, the renovation makes the house look like every other rehabbed house in the neighborhood, which presumably these buyers have looked at as well -- but they didn't seem to fall in love with those houses.

My take on this is two-fold:

1. Buyers have no vision and by staging, you're defining the spaces for them so they can better understand the flow of the house and how it *could* look when they move in;

2. A furnished house creates a more emotional connection with buyers, as compared to an empty house, which just feels unwelcoming.

While I've never done any split-testing to compare staging vs not staging, our average DOM is less than 2 weeks and our average sale:list price ratio is 96%+. So, something is working, and in my opinion, the staging has more to do with it than anything else.

Just my $.02...