Should a rental be staged for showings?
My husband & I have purchased a new home, but we are keeping our old home as a rental property.
I am curious if we should have it staged with some furniture or if we should keep it empty as we show it to potential tenants.
We did move out everything - even items we plan to donate because we are currently painting the whole house and replacing the carpet in the bedrooms. So we were leaning towards keeping it empty -- but if putting some furniture back would help get it rented, we would be happy to do the legwork.
We are not offering it furnished or partly furnished.
We are asking "going rate" for what we have - 3 bedroom/2bath house - but for our area we are in a higher price range because it is a stand-alone house (not an apartment building, not a duplex, not a townhouse).
The place is not extremely large (about 900sq ft) and part of my thought on staging would be to show that you can get a normal kitchen table in the kitchen, sofa, coffee table, etc in the living room.
The rent is $1200/month which for our area is on the higher side. (I'm from Northern NJ originally so to me $1200/month is pretty low -- but in our area house/rent just isn't as high as what I am accustomed to).
You can get 2-3 BR apartments for as little as $900, so in our area $1200/month is in a higher bracket (anything over $1000 is) -- but $1200/month is perfectly normal range for 3 bedroom houses we are seeing as available ($1000 - $1800 seems to be the normal range).