Some home sellers are surprised at the cost of staging a vacant home even though they know it will help them sell a house faster and for more money 💵. So I’ve decided to break it down. It’s pretty simple.
Let’s take a typical home that needs five rooms staged, to include: the dining room, living room, the kitchen, the master bedroom, bathroom, and an extra bedroom or office. Here’s a rough breakdown:
Pre-Installation Work 📦 🚚🏠
$240 4 hours labor in visiting the property, taking photos, analyzing the spaces in the photos, developing the design, selecting all the furnishings, art work, accessories etc. that will work best to stage the home. Many designers bill these hours at $120/ hour (typical designer hourly rate in Winnipeg) – we bill $60 per hour for this phase of work.
Staging 📦 🚚🏠
$120 Moving crew
$200 two assistants to prep and pack inventory
$100 moving truck
$200 + purchase of decor specific to that home
De-staging:🚚 🏠 📦
$120 movers
$100 rental truck
$200 two assistants to pack up and restock inventory
So before even paying for the stager’s time spent on site installing furniture, accessories, decor, hanging art, etc., that’s already $1280 just for the helpers involved in the stage and destage of the home. This doesn’t account for the time spent on site installing and setting up the staging to make your house pop with Wow Factor – that typically requires another 24 hours of work on site for the typical stage. And this doesn’t include any rental fee for the use of what is typically $5,000 – $10,000 of our carefully curated inventory.
It typically takes a total of 24 hours actually worked on site to stage an average home.
And then there is the liability insurance, storage facility rental, capital invested into inventory (which is changed, updated and replaced frequently) and all of the costs of having a small business such as the attorney fees, bookkeeping, website, marketing, software for inventory management, contract management, etc. – all of which have to be factored into costs, as in the case with any business. A business does not have the goal of just breaking even on costs, but to actually be profitable. 💵.
So as you can see, there is a lot more work and expense going on behind the scenes when you hire a stager than you have probably ever considered. When you think about the critically important role properly executed home staging plays in getting a home sold in today’s competitive market, it becomes apparent that a good home stager with the correct level of expertise is well worth the cost of what they charge, and they aren’t cashing in all the way to the bank when you examine the real costs and expenses involved in executing a home staging.