Beautifully Stage Your Rental Home Using These Tips

In the sea of potential rentals that the Portland metro area offers, making sure your property stands out from the crowd is key to finding a great tenant. In a world where numerous internet listings provide new tenants with an endless catalog of potential offerings, owners who stage their photos have a better chance of catching a potential renter’s eye. 

But though staging a rental might seem easy — after all, you just need to take some pretty photos, right? — many factors can make or break the work you put into sprucing up a property for its market debut. If you’re thinking of staging your home, it pays to keep both the benefits and challenges in mind. 

Should You Stage Your Unit?

Staging a home allows you to show your dream tenant what their life could look like if they rent from you. It also allows you to highlight your property’s best aspects, like a beautiful south-facing window or sleek hardwood floors, while sprucing up the less desirable elements of a home. Little touches can make the difference between a small bedroom feeling cramped and claustrophobic, or cozy and cute. It’s not about hiding flaws or misleading your potential tenants — it’s about showing them all the little details that can make their future home shine. 

When taking a prospective renter through an empty home, you’re relying on their imagination to conjure up the daily fixtures of life. But not everyone has the eyes of an interior designer, and sometimes the reality of a beautifully staged home can be an even more powerful marketing tool than showing off a blank canvas. If you have the money, energy, and desire to stage your home, the results can help you connect with an excellent tenant. 

Tips to Make Your Property Shine 

There are many ways to ensure that potential tenants see your property at its best. To start, make sure you begin with a clean, decluttered unit. You should schedule your photo shoot as you would a tour: each shot should be clean, neat, and devoid of pets or other people. 

Furniture can help make an empty room more exciting, while also giving a prospective tenant a better idea of the room’s size. Think about the type of tenant you envision renting from you. Whether you believe your unit is a good fit for a working professional or a family of four, the style of furniture can help you market your property as you see fit. 

When choosing how to decorate and arrange your furnishings, take each room’s strong suits into account. Use decorative accents such as flowers or pops of color to draw the eye to that lovely fireplace. A spare room offers another opportunity to further tailor your rental to the perfect tenant — style it as either a home office or a playroom, and ensure it catches their eye.

Great Pictures Make a Great Listing

Staging a home takes a combination of artistry and marketing. Once you have your rooms furnished and decorated, it’s time to capture your hard work on camera. Lighting is key when photographing your unit; aim for the gentler light of morning, evening, or a cloudy day for exterior shots, and photograph your interiors with as much natural light as possible. Ensure the angles and composition of your pictures frame those same attributes that you emphasized in the decorating process. 

Remember, though tweaking a photo’s brightness might help it pop, you don’t want to edit your photos to the point where they look doctored. The goal of staging and marketing your property is never to mislead a potential tenant, and in today’s world of rising rental scams, people like to feel as if they’re seeing what they’re going to get. 

Photos Are Only the Beginning

Though the pictures you’ll end up posting online to show off all your wonderful property has to offer are important, the work doesn’t stop there. Owner’s who stage photographs can get the lighting just so and the angles at their most flattering. But when a tenant shows up to tour your property, they will want to be sure that the real deal matches what they’ve seen in the pictures. Ideally, your property will exceed their expectations; you want to show them that the reality of renting from you is even better than the photos. 

This means you cannot rely on the tricks of a photographer’s trade to find a good renter. Make sure that your property can stand the test of a tour by completing any maintenance or cosmetic touches before the time comes to begin showing it off, even if they don’t appear in the pictures. When everything off-screen looks as good as your photos, you’re showing the tenant that they have even more to look forward to when moving in themselves. 

What To Do After You Stage Your Rental? 

Showing potential tenants the beauty of your rental property is a crucial step to finding the right tenant, but it’s also only the beginning. Rent Portland Homes by Darla Andrew is here to help. We provide live walk-through videos for all our properties, which we post on our YouTube channel. This allows prospective tenants with busy lives to see how beautiful your property is in more than just still photos. Our broad reach of advertising on platforms such as Zillow, Trulia, Instagram, and more ensures that the beautiful images of your expertly staged rental meet as broad an audience as possible. 

To learn more about what our management team can offer, call or text Darla at (503) 515-3170 or reach out to our rental team through the contact form on our site. We understand how much work, energy, and money you put in your property. We’re here to make sure that investment pays off, month after month.