Furnish or Leave Bare?

[flip_it_fast]

Is it better to stage a house that you are going to flip with furniture and accessories or to leave it bare? It is my opinion that you should stage the house with furnishings and some inexpensive accessories.

I believe it is best to have every room of the house furnished in some way and staged. A bare room is not very appealing. You can do many little things that are inexpensive to pull a room together and make it worth looking at.

Look around at your local second hand shops for great pieces. You will definitely be suprised at what you can find for a great price.

Also, remember to do the little things such as add some fake greenery throughout the home. Maybe a few candles, minimal artwork. Don't forget about the bathrooms either. Purchase a set of new towels to hang and add some fragrant soaps. Buyers will find this a lot more appealing than just empty rooms.

[patricia]

I totally agree, you want to let the potential buyer see what the space looks like lived in, so they can get their own ideas on what they would put in certain spaces, and you may give them some ideas they did not think of.

Good post and thanks

[Lady Flipper]

A good idea for staging is to rent furniture.

You don't want to make it an extention of your personality or likes and dislikes, you just want to show off the space (size) of the rooms and allow the buyer to see themselves in it.

So you want understated furniture, so the buyer thinks to himself - "oh look at all that space. I could do this and that..."

Completely without furniture people have trouble imagining living there, but with clean, impersonal (neutral) sparse furnishings people will be able to imagine what they want to do to make it all theirs.

And people imagining their own personal preferences in the house is half the battle - now you have people thinking about living there and designing their own space...

[Eyeofngt]

We think alike.. I hate looking at an empty house. They will sell a lot quicker if they have some furniture in them. Looks livable, and like you said they can imagine what thier things would look like in there. An empty house looks gloomy to me.