If you’re looking to put your home on the market, finding a local home stager to make your home appealing to as many buyers and possible is a great idea.
We’ve already talked about the massive benefits to hiring a home stager. We found that you can expect to sell your home an average of 60-73% faster and with a 10-17% increase in the total sales price with a home stager, which is incredible!
But how much does it cost to stage a home? Specifically, how much is a home stager in Kansas City or Midwest?
What do you need to know when hiring a home stager?
Average Home Staging Cost for Kansas City
Prices can vary when hiring a home stager. In Kansas City and the Midwest, you can typically expect to pay either a one-time fee of $500-$850 or a percentage-based fee (average of 1%-2%) of the home’s final sales price. Some stagers charge per-room ($300-$500 on average), while others charge an hourly rate of around $70-$95/hr.
Sources: Home-Staging Promatcher, Homeadvisor
The Midwest is typically more affordable when compared to the rest of the United States and the real estate market.
According to Home-Staging Promatcher, within Kansas City, you can see some hourly home staging rates as low as $40.00/hr.
But you shouldn’t only be concerned about the cost of home staging. We already know that staging your house is absolutely worth the money.
What we need to be concerned about is who we pick to do the staging. Not all house staging professionals are made equal. In fact, you need to be careful when choosing a stager. Opening up your home is a vulnerability, so anyone you let in and do business with needs to meet some quality standards and have a track record of not only being professional but getting amazing results!
At Dani Beyer Real Estate, we’ve served over 1,045+ clients. We’ve been around the block and have worked with multiple staging professionals – the good and the bad. It would destroy us inside if we didn’t share with you what we knew and gave you some things to watch out for. Keep reading and we’ll give you exactly what you need to find a home stager in Kansas City that is worth every penny.
How to Get a Home Stager in Kansas City
First, we need to point out the best places to find a home stager in the Midwest or in Kansas City.
Typically you can find a home staging professional via online platforms like Yelp, Facebook, Google, Houzz, or even Thumbtack.
We did a quick google search of “home stagers kansas city” and 181,000 results were found. Multiple stagers local to the area came up.
Google will give you a decent list of some of the top-rated stagers.
However, the best way we recommend finding quality and top talent is to look to your local or favorite real estate agents. Real estate agents are well connected and know the backstories of these home stagers that you wouldn’t know about. More on this below.
3 Steps to Finding a Good Home Stager in Kansas City
We want to be transparent with you: finding a good home stager is not as easy as it sounds. You need to be careful who you open up your home to and do business with. But luckily for you, we’ve been in the real estate industry for years now and know what to watch out for.
With our experience, we compiled the three things you need to look out for before hiring a home stager.
1. Ask a Trusted or Local Real Estate Agent
This is by far the quickest and simplest way to finder a trustworthy staging professional. There’s nothing that will beat asking your local real estate agent.
They know just how good a stager really is and can tell you what’s behind the surface of their online reviews and profiles. If you find a good agent that has been in the business for a while and has respect in the community, you should trust their opinion.
If you don’t know a real estate agent, simply text your friends, family, mom, or co-workers to see who they’ve used. If you want some home stager recommendations in Kansas City, give us a call or message us here. Over 1,045+ families have trusted us to help them sell or buy a home. We can send you our top home staging recommendations. Just let us know what you’re looking for and we’d be more than happy to help.
2. Look For Bad & Fake Online Reviews
It’s easy to look at online reviews and go straight to all the positive comments. By nature, we like and want to see positive things. And this is okay. Read the positive reviews! But with online reviews being as popular as they are, most are typically fluff: home stagers only want you to see reviews for clients that are 100% brand advocates and happy with their service. But this only tells half the story.
When finding a quality home stager, we want to understand the full story and background. Make sure you read the bad reviews. Look for situations where the client might have felt confused, uncomfortable, or lacked clarity when doing business. When a stager has bad reviews, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hire them, it just means you need to use common sense and weigh the situations accurately.
You should also look out for fake online reviews. Unfortunately, fake reviews are out there more than we think. It’s always good to be safe. Here are some tips when trying to spot fake reviews:
- Many at once. Multiple one-star or five-star reviews posted over a very brief period.
- Lack of detail. Lack specifics on products, times or situations.
- Nothing else reviewed. One extremely positive or negative comment by a reviewer who has never reviewed anything else.
- Oddly similar. Repeated words and phrases or a similar writing style in multiple reviews.
- Many verbs, fewer nouns. Genuine reviews focus more on situations and mention more concrete nouns.
Source: Glean.info
3. Make Sure They Have The Heart of a Teacher
Once you’ve found a home stager online that you like or think would be a good fit, you want to contact them and confirm they have the heart of a teacher.
What do we mean by this?
Any sales rep, business owner, real estate agent, and home stager who has a heart for educating their clients and helping them understand the why behind what they do is worthy of doing business with.
If a home stager can explain and guide you through their process and teach you why they advise you to go down a certain path, it gives you the confidence to move forward with less risk. The goal is for you to understand their process enough so you’re not lost in the dark.
Don’t Undervalue Your Home: What’s Your Home Worth?
Do you know what your home is actually worth? Have you run neighborhood comps to make sure you’re not undervaluing your home?
If you live in Kansas City, we offer a free home value estimate. It takes 4 minutes to complete and you’ll have your customized market value within 24 hours of submitting it.
We’ll do a complete analysis of your home and compare it with other homes in your neighborhood. It’s 100% free. Just request it here.
