If you’re spending all your marketing efforts chasing after homes for sale that need staging, you’re missing another opportunity. Especially in a slow real estate market, where many property owners are choosing to rent their homes and condos out rather than selling in a down market.

In many areas, the rental market is saturated and landlords need to do what they can to attract quality tenants for the right price.

I did a home staging consultation for a woman with an apartment in her home that had been sitting empty for 3 months. This represented a loss of rental income of $3,000, plus she was really feeling the squeeze given that she relied on this rental to pay her mortgage. While she had about 50 prospective tenants in to view the apartment, none were interested in renting. So in addition to the lost income, she’d wasted considerable time advertising the rental and showing the apartment with no results.

We spent almost 4 hours together, during which I gave her all my recommendations for how she could make the rental space more appealing to tenants. My suggestions weren’t going to cost her anything extra since we were able to use items she already had in her own home to complete the look we needed in the apartment.

Her total investment in my time: $1000. The results: she had her choice of three tenants within the next week.

These images were provided by Staging Diva Graduate Isabelle Gelderblom of iDesign in the Southwest of England. She transformed an apartment for $500 which was then rented within 2 weeks for more than competing rentals in the area, despite being a stagnant rental market. Read more of Isabelle’s home staging success story.