It needs to be done right…. I agree with Jingle in that I’ve seen some houses staged with old wicker furniture and an eclectic mix of items that looked like they came from gradma’s tag sale. Staging a home with old beat up furniture and out of date items looks like trash. I only use modern looking contemporary peices that blend well with our finished rehab and fit the theme of clean, bright and modern. This way the staging items further accentuate the great rehab we just finished.

These days I more worried about how the appraisals are plunging here. The new standards are rearing their ugly head and I don’t see tighter appraisals and comparing non-comparable homes are a cure to an already sagging market. I maybe setting out the next couple months and go fishing until all of this settles down.

Cheers,
Jingle

To you other point about staging making the house look smaller, that just means you’re doing it incorrectly!

A good staging job will make a house (and each specific room) look MUCH bigger. A good stager uses small furniture to accentuate the size of the room, and positions the furniture in such a way as to give the room and the house a feeling of openness and structure.

Here’s a great example: http://reistartup.com/wp-content/uploads/Second_Chance_House/Staged/living2_staged.jpg

This living room is actually very small and oddly shaped. It took us many hours to figure out how to stage it to make it look like a living room. Had we not done so, buyers would have walked into the house and said, “Wow, this place doesn’t really have a living room,” because they wouldn’t have been able to imagine a furniture layout that made sense (at least not right away).

Here’s another example: http://reistartup.com/wp-content/uploads/Corn_House/After/diningroom1_thumb.JPG

If you were to walk into that house without the dining room furniture, you’d think to yourself, “Wow, this dining room is too small to do ANYTHING with!” But, we found a very small table and a small wine rack, and as you can see from the picture, it looks like a nearly full-sized dining room. Instead of the buyers getting a negative feeling from that room, they instead leave with a positive impression.

That’s the purpose of staging — accentuate the positive and hide the negative. And making rooms (and the house overall) look bigger, is probably the single best thing you can do to hide the negative in a typical house.

Far be it for me to question anyone’s strategy…I just know what works for us…

The reason I’m a huge believer in staging is that we consistently hear from agents, “My buyer has looked at 30 houses in this price range, and this one is by far the nicest. My client was blown away.”

Now, we’re familiar with the other 30 houses the buyer probably looked at (we know our market very well), and while some of them are likely crap, others are probably just as nice as ours, but without the staging. But, as soon as the buyer sees the staged house, it becomes a home, and it stands out from all the sterile houses they’ve seen previously and makes an impression on them.

If we didn’t consistently get this feedback (and offers from these buyers as well), we probably wouldn’t be so enthralled with staging. But, given our experience, I couldn’t imagine trying to get a quick sale on a property without staging it.

Jingle

The big issue you’ll run into with lease-optioning furniture is that your buyers are going to want to negotiate the furniture into the deal, so that they can roll it into the loan. So, they’ll want to negotiate with YOU, not the store that is selling it.

And I can promise you that the store selling it will be charging plenty more than you would want to charge had you just bought it yourself. So, you’ll end up in the middle of the negotiations, and will likely have to pay out of pocket to get them the furniture at the price they need (or risk losing the deal).

My wife definitely considered going that route when we started out, and in the right circumstances, we would certainly consider using rental furniture (for example, if we really need furniture for The Mini House and none of our other furniture becomes available any time soon).

Once we ran the numbers though, we realized that if we’re always going to have at least 2-3 houses on the market at any given time, it was more cost-beneficial to just buy the stuff. We can furnish an entire house for about $2000 now, and the furniture will easily last 4-5 moves without sustaining any major damage. This means we can spend $2000 for 12-18 months worth of houses.

The other benefit is that we can negotiate the furniture into the deal if the buyer is interested. This has happened a few times, and gives us an opportunity to turn our our old inventory.

And, the best part is that when we sell the furniture with the house, we generally get full-price for it, so the furniture often ends up being free!