A staged, fully furnished lake house sold in week nine after two empty showings fell flat
Take a dated 1990s lake property bought at 2.28M out of a probate situation, with 520k put into renovation, and a sale at 3.19M, netting a bit over 210k after commissions, carry, and closing costs, across a fourteen month hold from key to key. The move worth keeping: staging fully furnished and pricing the furniture into the list, at a cost of roughly 41k in rental and delivery over the hold. Two showings at the empty stage produced nothing. Once restaged with furniture, an offer came in eleven days later. At this price point, buyers often can't picture an empty house and need to walk into a finished life rather than bare rooms. What nearly breaks a project like this is carry running longer than planned. At 24k a month all in against a budgeted eleven months, going to fourteen months adds roughly 72k that wasn't planned for, coming straight out of the profit line rather than a reserve. Going to month twenty would put a project like this at breakeven and forces hard conversations. Window costs are another common trap. A quote used to underwrite the job from someone who never physically measured the openings can come in far under the real number, for example 94k against a 61k allowance across 38 openings. At a luxury price point, buyers won't accept fogged glass, so there's rarely a version of the project where that scope gets skipped. The broader lesson: the profit on a project like this looks large and is real, but it represents nine months of capital sitting still and is one bad market quarter away from disappearing.
