Where the staging line item actually belongs in a flip's financial model
Small flippers tend to place the staging cost in different parts of their deal model, and the inconsistency matters more over many deals than on any single one. Some treat it as a rehab budget line item alongside appliances and finishes. Others place it below the line with commission and title as a cost of sale. Others don't isolate it at all and simply assume the exit price already reflects a staged showing. On a typical deal, staging often runs between roughly half a point and a point and a half of the sale price, small enough that it rarely draws scrutiny on its own, but consistent enough that misplacing it skews both the rehab contingency and the selling cost percentage on every deal run through the same model. The case for the rehab budget is that staging is a scoped, quoted, one-time spend on the property that should compete with other property spend for the same dollars. The case for selling costs is that the expense exists only because the property is being sold, scales with price and market conditions, and disappears entirely if the property is rented instead. A hybrid treatment, where installation and design are treated as a fixed cost and monthly furniture rental is treated like a carrying cost such as taxes and insurance, captures both realities reasonably well. There is no universally correct placement for a single deal, but consistency matters most once averages are being tracked across many deals.
Where do you put staging in a flip model?
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