Use PODS Storage When Staging Your Home for Sale
Staging homes for sale has become all the rage in the last two years. With the real estate market in the tank, sellers are considering every option to make their houses sell quickly without taking a huge hit to their bottom line.
By now, you probably know what staging is. For those who don’t, it’s making your house more appealing to buyers by removing personal items, making the house look less “lived in”, and dressing it up with the latest styles. In most cases, staging is limited to minor repair/refresh work (painting & flooring), and furniture replacement. In the past, this has been accomplished by the seller renting furniture until a sale is complete. More recently, however, Realtors have been purchasing and storing their own staging furniture to use on their most valuable clients’ homes. (This differentiates the agent from the sea of other Realtors scrambling for the relatively small amount of remaining business, and it fattens their commission checks when the home sells). According to Kippinger.com, a survey in 2007 revealed that staged homes sold far faster than their competition, and netted on average $26,000 more than expected.
If you’re considering staging your home, one of the first things you’ll have to contend with is where to put all the extra clutter you’ve amassed over the years. After all, your kids’ Imaginarium train table that doubles as your coffee table isn’t going to help potential buyers visualize their stuff in your space. Likewise, that dusty home gym and cross country ski machine hiding out in the spare bedroom won’t put any extra greenbacks in your wallet. You need to get rid of them–but not forever– just long enough to get the place sold.
PODS offers a great solution for your situation. For about $185 / month, you can have a POD dropped off in the front of your house, loaded up, and taken away to PODS’ secure storage facility. Then, after you settle on your new place, the nice PODS folks will ship your stuff to your new home where you can unload right into your front door. While PODS are more expensive than traditional self-storage (by about a factor of 2 in this area), they offer the convenience of loading and unloading at your front door. If your staging effort goes well, you should only need the POD for about 2 months. If you’re half as successful as the average person was in Kipplingers’ survey, you’ll still net more than $12,500 from the effort. That’s a whole lot of dough to buy more trains for your kid’s Imaginarium playset, or the latest Tony Little creation for your spare bedroom.
What do you think? Have you decluttered your home to stage it for moving? Have you had a good/bad experience with PODS?
Image courtesy of jblyberg.
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May 30th, 2008 9:22 pm
The PODS were decidedly too pricey for our last move, especially considering that the house we were moving out of was only valued in the five-digits (on leased land, long story). But we rented a storage facility and drove loads and loads of stuff to it, and I am very certain that getting the house cleared out of a HUGE amount of stuff made a difference in our being able to sell it, especially as the house market bust was just around the corner.
Also, we negotiated with the movers that we hired to swing by our storage facility and pick up and pack up everything that was in there as part of our moving contract, for nothing more than they were going to charge us for the move from our house. If PODS seems too pricey (or, as was also an issue for us, we were packing up too little at a time to make it worth it to us and didn’t want the pod sitting out in our yard as folks looked at the house), consider renting a storage facility that is convenient to your old or new house, and talk to your movers about including it in your moving contract.
May 30th, 2008 10:20 pm
Leslie,
Thanks for the comment! You’re absolutely right about storage facilities offering a cheaper alternative. With PODS, you really pay for the convenience of the drop off, pick-up, and storage. The last article I wrote about PODS compared them to moving trucks. The moving truck option will be cheaper for most applications.
PODS are really nice if you need about a week to get things loaded up, and you are going to complete the move within a month - otherwise the holding costs start to really bite.
September 19th, 2008 6:47 pm
Fred - you mention holding costs when using pods.com. This isn’t the case with all portable storage companies. Many pod units can be held for a number of days/weeks at no charge. But really, when comparing the cost of portable storage with self-storage, you have to ask yourself: “What is your time worth?”