5 Tips for Staging Rentals

When you’re looking to convince prospective tenants that your rental property is their next home, staging rentals can help applicants get a real feel for the space.

However, if you’re not an interior designer or professional decorator, you might not know where to start or what key furniture features are important or what rooms to stage. There are usually options for renting staging furniture, but if you’ve decided to DIY stage your rental, below are easy tips for affordably staging your property with appealing accessories.

Keep it minimal

Less is more when staging rentals. Why? You want enough furniture or decorations to draw the tenant’s attention to the hominess and potential of the property, but enough space that they can envision their own furniture, decorations, and possessions in the space.

Where to find cheap staging rental furniture

If you’ve decided you’d like to invest in staging rental furniture (versus renting furniture), here are a few ideas where you might be able to purchase some great finds!

  • Thrift store
  • Garage sales
  • Facebook Marketplace
  • Craigslist
  • Amazon
  • Wayfair

For thrifted furniture, make sure it’s in good condition & clean!

Some unique ideas for easy rental staging 

  • Rocking chairs
  • Vintage mirrors
  • Lamps
  • Floor mirrors
  • House plants
  • Vases or mason jars with flowers
  • Gauzy curtains
  • Barstools
  • Plus couch
  • Coffee tables
  • Stand with decorative flowers 
  • Kitchen: fresh flowers, fruit bowl, table, decorative dish towels

How to store staging furniture

You can rent a storage unit or store in your own home to store furniture to reuse for future vacancies & listing photos. Or keep the staging furniture minimal by skipping the couch & coffee tables.

If you’re renting staging furniture, simply return it to the company!

Stick with neutral colors & clean rooms

You don’t want to polarize a tenant’s opinion of your rental with an unusual color or a specific style of decorating. While this might attract some renters, it could deter others who find the color, style, or furniture, well, ugly.

Stick to neutral colors (white, beige, black, grey) and minimalist furniture when staging rentals so that it gives the tenants a picture of what the potential of the space is, without over-cluttering it. 

Additionally, you’ll want to clean the place top to bottom to really impress your next renter with their next, picture-perfect home.

  • Clean windows to let sunlight stream in and really brighten up the place
  • Steam clean & vacuum carpet
  • Polish hardwordflowers
  • New light bulbs if the lighting is dim
  • Clean out any possessions left by previous tenants, if applicable

Make sure you have fresh paint

Following the same principle as neutral furniture colors, when staging rentals you’ll want to ensure your walls are painted with a neutral color. The best neutral colors for walls are light so that it brightens up the rental. For example, white or cream, beige, or light grey.

What are neutral color ideas? Typically, the main neutral colors are white, beige, and light grey. White is the most common color for rentals, as it provides the most minimal, bright, & clean look.

If you do have an accent wall, you might want to offer tenants the opportunity to repaint if they choose. However, the main reason to keep the walls & furniture a neutral color is to ensure the place looks bright and gives the property a clean feel.

Flowers & diffusers always add a homey touch 

One way to give your apartment a cozy feel is to place scent diffusers around the property to entice tenants with a homey smell. 

Now, you don’t want to use too many so that the tenants are overwhelmed by the smell, but using scents like vanilla is an easy way to give any prospective renters a relaxed and comforting experience.

Flowers are also an affordable & simple way to provide a sense of home to the vacancy. Place them in the kitchen or dining room to attract the tenant’s eye and brighten the room. If you don’t want to purchase real flowers (after all, some renters may have allergies), fake flowers are even less expensive and can be re-used the next time you have an empty unit to fill!

Improve listing photos

The goal of staging rentals is to quickly fill your vacancy by enticing tenants to apply & sign a lease. You can’t do that if the listing photos aren’t showcasing your property in the very light! 

  • Staging rentals can improve listing photos
  • Tenants scan through photos to determine if they want to apply
  • Adding a few key pieces of furniture, fresh paint & flowers, and capturing the rental when the sunlight is streaming through the windows can draw the tenant’s eye into the listing photos.

Need a few ideas for staging rentals?

If you’re still unsure about how to stage rentals, there is an easy, simple way to get ideas—look at what others are doing!

You can use sites such as Realtor.com and Zillow to look at listing photos to see what type of furniture other landlords or homeowners are using to stage their homes.

 You can also visit Ikea (or look online) to get trendy home decor ideas and the accessories!