Should you stage your rental?

[Kenny Hall]

What do you do with your rental when you're ready to list it for rent? Do you take photos as-is and list it empty or do you stage it before taking photos and listing it? 

I've found greater success in listing a rental property staged. It decreases the days on the market, increases monthly rent and increases the number of tours. Most people are sitting on their couch or at their computer looking for their next place to rent and you want your place to stand out from the rest. Having the property well staged and good photos taken will drive a greater number of inquiries on your property. 

Recently, we had a property sit on the market for almost 80 days. Of course I'm not proud of that. Losing almost 3 months of potential rental income is hard. The property was listed in the middle of the winter so it was a hard time anyway. We were shooting for top dollar rent we should be able to get in the summer. And the house had somewhat of a weird flow. We had almost 40 showings and only a few applications (all which weren't approved). We marketed this property through multiple channels and even dropped the price and it still didn't rent. I decided to offer the client free staging. I got the crew in and out same day, got new photos taken and uploaded them to the listing. The next day I had 8 new tours. I was shocked by the feedback - "This home is so cute", "It's nicer than the other places we visited", and "It has a nice flow into the kitchen". I knew the place had a weird flow but to get feedback specifically about the nice flow! That evening I had two more applications and we accepted a tenant that moved in two weeks later. 

Sometimes a property just needs some help in showing your prospective tenants the potential of the property. People can have a hard time visualizing what it might be like to live there. You can help them by being intentional about staging it.

What do you think? Worth it? I'd love to hear some thoughts on this!