Do investor buyers care whether the empty unit is staged?

When I'm reading a small multi I open the T-12 and the rent roll before I look at a single photo, and if the numbers don't work I never see the photos at all. So on paper I'm on your side.

But I've noticed something about myself on the ones that do pass the numbers screen. The empty unit photos are where I decide how much deferred maintenance I'm walking into. Bare floors and a bad ceiling fan in an empty room read as neglect to me even when the numbers are fine. Furniture would have hidden that, which is either helpful to you or a reason for me to be annoyed.

The whole question turns on buyer pool composition, and you can get closer to knowing than you think.

Two to four unit buildings sit in an unusual spot because they can be bought by an owner occupant using residential financing in many cases, and by an investor using commercial or portfolio terms. Which lending path is available shapes who shows up. Program requirements and occupancy rules change, and they vary by lender, so confirm what's actually available on a building your size in writing with a lender before you build a marketing plan around it.

That aside, ask your agent for the last six to ten sales of two to four unit buildings in your submarket and how each one closed. Owner occupant purchases are usually visible in the loan type on the recorded documents, though what's public varies by state and roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all. If the recent pattern is mostly investor purchases, the 1,600 is buying you very little that a clean photo set wouldn't.

On the staging itself, the mechanism it works through is buyer attention and imagination, and neither of those does anything to a cap rate calculation. What staging can do in an investor sale is signal that the building is cared for, which affects how aggressively a buyer prices repair risk. That's a softer effect than the price and speed effect staging shows on single family homes.

One cheaper version worth pricing: a paid consultation with no furniture rental, where a stager tells you what to fix, paint and remove before photos. That captures a decent share of the effect at a fraction of the spend.

Before you put a couch in that unit, walk it with someone who does trades work and count the things a buyer will photograph on their phone and use against you. Scuffed baseboards, a toilet that runs, a hollow core door with a hole punched in it. I'd spend the first 600 of that 1,600 there every time, because a staged room with a bad door still reads as a bad door.

The way I'd frame it, after five years running a service business next to this: are the photos the advertisement, or is the walkthrough? For a small multi in an ordinary neighborhood, the listing photos are doing almost all the work, and vacant rooms photograph badly at wide angle. If you stage, stage for the camera and pull it early. Eight weeks of rental on a building that might take longer than that to close is where people get bled.

Working through licensing now and the thing my mentor keeps repeating is that photos buy showings and showings buy offers. Empty rooms don't get clicked. Whether that carries over to a 4 unit where half the pool has a calculator open, I genuinely don't know.

One thing to keep straight, @cairn. Furniture isn't part of what gets valued. An appraiser is looking at the building, the units and comparable sales, and a rented sofa doesn't enter that. So staging can help you find a buyer willing to pay more, and it does nothing to help that price survive a valuation if it comes in low. Worth knowing which of those two problems you're worried about.

Logistics answer nobody has raised. Which floor is the vacant unit on and is there an elevator? My crew charges more for a third floor walk up and rightly so, and if three of your four units are occupied the install day means strangers with dollies in a shared stairwell. I'd tell your tenants in advance, in writing, and I'd ask the stager whether their 1,600 assumes ground floor access. Half the quotes I see do.

Clean, empty, well lit, honest photos and a tidy rent roll. That has worked on every small building I've watched sell around here and it costs almost nothing.

I'm new to all this, so what exactly is a consultation only version? @rena-expert mentioned it and I've seen the term but I don't know whether you're paying for a written report, someone walking through with you, or both.

@ember from what I've seen it's a walkthrough of a couple of hours where the stager goes room by room and tells you what to remove, what to repaint and where to put the furniture you already have, usually with a written list afterward. No rental, no delivery truck, so it's a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand.

The question I was too embarrassed to ask until now: if you use virtual staging on the photos instead, do you have to say so? Every set I've seen labels the images, and I gather how disclosure gets handled differs by state and by the local board, so ask your agent what the rule is where you are rather than guessing from a forum.

Numbers on it. Call the building 480,000. The 1,600 is a third of a percent. For that spend to pay you need either 1,600 more in price, which is a rounding error at that value and totally invisible in the noise, or you need it to shave enough days off the marketing time to cover carry. If your monthly carry is say 2,900 all in, staging paying for itself means it pulled the sale forward by roughly two and a half weeks.

I have no idea whether it does that on a 4 unit and neither does anyone else in this thread. On a single family I'd believe two and a half weeks. Here I'd want @canton's honest answer about whether the photos changed his offer, and he already told you they changed how he priced repair risk, which is not nothing.

The eight week window is the part I'd push on. @thatch is right that extension fees are where this goes wrong, and small multis around me have been sitting longer than the single family stuff. Ask for a four week term with an option to extend at a rate written into the agreement now, not quoted later.