Updated June 2024:
So your realtor told you that professional home staging will help you get more equity out of the sale of your home, but you’ve got one big question, “What does home staging cost in Winnipeg?”
You’ve heard real estate industry experts, realtors and property investors insist that staging sells houses faster and for more money. You’ve seen the statistics that support that. You’re convinced. But now you want to know what is it going to cost for us to work this magic for you in 2024?
The first thing to keep in mind, is that if you are using a skilled professional staging company, staging is not a “cost”, its an investment that pays you back a multiple return on the investment you put into it. So, presuming you are using a skilled, professional home staging company, you will always get back more that what you put into it. This isn’t just hyperbole, its backed by solid real estate industry statistics and research that is compiled year after year.
We’ll give you some general guidelines for you to base your preliminary budget on, but first here are a few things you’ll need to know: Different home stagers in Winnipeg have different ways of setting their fees, and any of the pricing structures we list here are valid. Some use a standard calculation based on the square footage of the home; less common but a nonetheless valid calculation is a general price per room (varies by type of room); other home stagers may charge a percentage of the listing price – for home stagers who use this pricing model, its usually 1% of listing price but depending on the price point of the house it can go a bit higher, for instance 1.5% or even 2%. Then there are all the variables that affect price, such as the style and level of staging required for appropriately staging any particular home; plus factors that affect moving costs (stairs, parking, distance from loading area to the home, etc), as well as others. So calculating the cost for staging a home can be a little more complicated than just naming a cost square foot because there are a number of other factors that do affect the cost on any particular home and therefore to give a reliable estimate, an experienced home stager will generally need to know some of the particulars of the home, otherwise they may sometimes surprise you later with significant extra charges once they have actually have the complete picture (from a staging perspective) of the home in question.
But generally speaking, professional staging companies in Winnipeg will fall within a similar price range of one another for any given property. Because regardless of the pricing model they use, it generally all leads to the same general number (just like you can take varying routes to end up at the same destination). So if you get a few quotes, you’ll typically notice that they’re within the same general range of one another. If someone comes along with a price that is notably lower than the others, you are likely not comparing “apples to apples” – it is quite likely that the quality or quantity of the staging will be lower, and that can have a direct impact on the actual selling outcome (how fast your home sells, how many offers you receive, and the final selling price – all of which are directly influenced by the quality and style of the staging). There’s a saying about the home staging that goes, “Good staging isn’t cheap and cheap staging isn’t good”. There is a lot of truth in that. That doesn’t mean you should always choose the highest quote, but what it does mean is that the numbers should be quite close from one home staging company to the next IF you are getting a comparable quality of staging. And the quality of staging directly correlates to what your home will sell for in the end. The better the staging, generally speaking, the higher the probability of getting the maximum selling price. As a general rule, where home staging is concerned, cheaper is generally not better.
Professional home stagers have a lot of fixed costs and overhead (warehousing, inventory, insurance, moving, labour, etc). Home staging is not an inexpensive business to be in. These overhead costs influence what staging costs, so there isn’t usually not a lot of pricing variation among home staging companies who are legitimate businesses. For instance, if you’ve talked to 2 home staging companies and one says it will cost around $1800 to stage your property, and another says it will cost $1700, but someone else claims they can do it for $1450, remember the old adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There are numerous reasons why you should be wary of “cheap staging” (in short, it usually will not pull the same strong offers, and that’s the whole point of staging in the first place – so you won’t get the same return on your staging investment in which case you may be better off not spending the money at all. But that’s a lengthy topic of its own, so we’ll save that for a future post!)
Also, be aware that you need to make sure you are being given a firm quote, and not merely an estimate – estimates are not binding and can change whereas an actual quote is bind – its a firm price that won’t change (unless the specifications for the job change). Many consumers confuse the two. If its not a “quote”, it should clearly be labelled as such, along with a time frame for how long it is valid and when the price expires – that could be in 7 days, or in 90 days, so the details matter and should be clearly outlined. Otherwise, it might just be an estimate and you may be surprised with extra charges when the rubber hits the road. A quote is binding for the time period indicated on it. An estimate is not really binding (the price could change). So keep this in mind when comparing prices.
Either a site visit or photos is required to provide a firm quote because while general guidelines can be used to come up with a “ball park” estimate, there are a lot of variables that can affect the cost of staging a particular home. Factors such as accessibility and parking for movers, or the distance movers will have to carry furniture, and flights of stairs for both movers and stagers can impact cost. Then there are factors pertaining to the style and type of home itself which dictate the level and type of staging required which also influence price. The location of the home may need to be considered – a home outside the city may entail travel charges, for instance. A home in a high crime area carries a high level of risk for the home staging company, so they may need to charge more. You get the idea.
In addition to staging houses for home owners in Winnipeg and the surrounding area, here at The Home Stylists (TM), we work with a lot of property investors (aka “flippers”) as well as home builders, property managers and realtors who hire us again and again to stage the homes they are selling. They do this because they know that when their homes are staged by us, they typically see a very substantial return on their staging investment and based on experience they know their home will sell for significantly more than if left un-staged.
We’ll explain what home staging in Winnipeg typically costs, however, keep in mind that the only way to know for certain what it will cost to stage your specific home is to have us do a quote based on the specific details of the actual home and viewing photos of all the spaces to be staged or making a site visit.
That said, the going market rate Winnipeg home staging companies charge for professional vacant home staging in Winnipeg for the average home is generally around $2 per square foot. It may go a little higher, it may be a bit lower (remember all the variables we discussed earlier). So, if you are looking to stage a 1000 square foot home, you’re looking at paying about $2000, give or take, for an appropriate staging package with a professional staging company in Winnipeg. Many home staging companies also have a “minimum” below which it is not viable for them to move inventory around and do the all the behind the scenes work that goes into even a basic staging. There are substantial fixed costs and high overhead involved in home staging.
Keep in mind, its important to make sure you are dealing with an actual home staging company – whomever is staging your home should be a licensed and insured business as opposed to just someone who dabbles in home staging “on the side”. There are numerous reasons for this, but one very important reason has to do with liability. Anyone staging your home should carry liability insurance. If someone were to be injured on your property while they are there staging it, for instance, as the property owner you could be liable if they don’t carry liability insurance. This is something some folks don’t stop to consider when they come across what seems like an “opportunity” to save on staging.
We, for instance, carry 1 million dollars in liability insurance. This is important because you want to know you are protected against property damage, or in the case of injury on your premises. If for instance, a glass door gets broken, you want to know it will be covered by your home stager’s liability insurance (we also only work with moving companies who carry liability insurance, in case damage occurs during moving). In all the year’s we’ve been in the business, we’ve never had a single instance whereby we’ve caused damaged to a client’s home, but we have worked with realtors as well as other clients who have reported that they’ve experienced damage when working with other stagers, so it does happen. Home staging insurance can be expensive – the typical small-scale home stager who dabbles in staging on the side is highly unlikely to have invested in insurance. Even some of the more well recognized staging companies may try to trim their expenses by skipping the insurance. That opens you, as the homeowner, up to risk. So keep this in mind if someone quotes you a atypically low fee for staging – they probably aren’t actual pros (therefore they likely don’t have the skills to get you the maximum possible price on your home), nor are they likely to be insured. You should ask your home stager to see their certificate of liability insurance to ensure they have the correct coverage before proceeding.
Keep in ind that if you want to include a basement, you’ll need to add that additional square footage. Also, a higher-end home will needhigher-end staging, so that could impact price. A home that has particular challenges or problem areas may require more time or specialized inventory to address its issues, and that could impact price as well, even if the home itself isn’t that large. Ease of access, a lot of stairs… these types of factors also impact pricing for home staging.
Home stagers need to charge ongoing monthly fees if your home is still on the market beyond the initial staging contract period (usually 30 days or 45 days); those ongoing fees are typically substantially less than the initial contract fee, but how exactly the ongoing fees are calculated can vary among stagers. On average its a little less than half of the initial staging fee. Some will also charge an initial consultation to do a site visit at the home and assess your needs (this is not the same as charging for a quote – the fee applies when the home stager is actually dispensing advice, guidance and expertise during that consult). Some stagers charge additional fees for the design work that goes into the staging, moving, set-up, and de-staging. So when you are getting a price quotation from a home staging service, be sure to know the right questions to ask so that you aren’t met with any unanticipated charges or extra fees at the last minute that you hadn’t budgeted for. Is moving extra? Is design extra? Or is everything included in the price quoted? At our company, when we quote the price you see is the price you pay – there are no hidden costs or surprises – your total cost will be right there in black and white on our written quotation.
Another pricing model used among Winnipeg home staging companies is to charge a percentage of the value of the home, as we briefly touched on earlier. This is typically around 1%. This is another sound pricing model, because effective home staging will always get you more on the selling price than marketing the same home un-staged, and done correctly the staging should be tailored to the type, style and value of the home. The percentage model provides a very accurate guideline of the level of staging that should go into the home to support a successful sale.
So that gives you a good general idea of the typical Winnipeg home staging cost across different home staging companies. if you’d like a precise quote, we’d be happy to let you know exactly what we would charge to stage your home. Feel free to reach out to us at 204-390-8979.
We hope you’ve found this information to be helpful and informative as you consider staging your home.
See also “Is Staging Your Home Worth It?”