NEW YORK – With mortgage interest rates near 7%, home sellers are pulling out all the stops when it comes to finding buyers. According to Thumbtack, in 2024’s first quarter, requests to hire home-staging companies rose 10% compared to the previous year, and the average cost of staging a home increased 18% to $1,816 over the same period.
Real estate professionals say that staged homes sell quicker and for more money because it helps buyers visualize themselves in the home and helps them overlook any flaws. The costs of staging, however, can reduce a seller’s potential profits, complicate the moving process, and delay the timing of a sale.
Sellers do have options from merely decluttering their homes and hiding family photos to paying a stager a flat fee or hundreds of dollars for a one-time consultation and paying thousands of dollars monthly to hire a staging company to redecorate the entire house.
A report from the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) in 2023 found the median cost of staging was $400 when the sellers’ agent personally staged the home. Fees for staging cover labor, delivery, inventory rental and staging. Agreements are for 60 days on average, though fees can depend on the home’s location and size, as well as the extent of the makeover.
In some cases, real estate professionals say that stagers have increased their rates by as much as 30% in the last 12 months. Those costs can be higher for sellers looking for high-end furniture to stage their home. Another less expensive option is to opt for virtual staging, which relies on software to show what the space could look like even though no actual changes are made, or opting to simply stage the main rooms of interest, the master suite and the living room.
NAR reports that a fifth of agents believe a staged home increased offers between 1% and 5% when compared to homes that were not staged.
Source: Wall Street Journal (05/17/24) Dagher, Veronica
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