When the Company Is Relocating You, How Do You Stage a House????

Have the moving company come and pack up your clutter and store it for you until your move. Or have a big yard sale and get rid of everything ;o)

You can also wait to stage the house after everything is moved out. Have a staging company bring their own items for staging.

There is nothing easy about moving, whether you do it yourself or have someone else pack and move you. Lucky for you to have a relocation package to take the sting out. But you still have work to do, the more you can do sooner, the better.

I would take pictures of everything of value, develope the pictures and put a dollar value on the back of the picture. It may also be helpful to walk around your house with a video camera so you can document the condition of smaller value items in your house such as dishes, garden tools etc. good luck!

You have gotten great responses so far, but I would like to add a little bit about staging. I am not positive, but it sounds like you are concerned about staging the house after all of your furniture has been packed up. On the tv shoes about selling homes, they often use companies with rental furniture. This might be a budget friendly option for you. Staging is not a mandatory thing, but it does give buyers an idea of how to use the space. You do not need much furniture for a positive staging. Good luck!

We are in the Army and we have always had movers pack us and move us, and they have the same replacement value insurance + coverage by the Army. I have never in 8 moves had to make an inventory of ALL our stuff-- only certain high value items and big items that require special packing or moving equipment. For our own protection, we always take pictures/videos and document things like electronics and DVDs. What moving company is telling you to list everything?? I'd love to know so I don't ever use them!! :-) Also, if I have boxes that are already packed (which we always do since we never really finish unpacking from the last move...), they usually just look through them to make sure they are packed adequately, or sometimes they take the stuff out of the box and then re-pack them in another.

Did you get instructions in writing from them? Is your company telling you this or the moving company? I would call them to clarify.

The Army uses all kinds of different moving companies... I really can't imagine this being any different, but maybe it is. I'm really sorry you'd have to do all that. Moving sucks enough as it is. Good luck!

Try this tool to document your possessions

https://www.digitallocker.com/Home/Dashboard/View

I don't have and house staging advice. My advice is to keep all your reciept from moving that are not covered. They are atax write off.

I would say forget the hassle. If the company has to buy the house if it doesn't sell they have to pay what a reasonable amount.

So many of my friends have been transferred with Conoco-Phillips and have not been able to sell their homes for what it was listed for. They eventually got bought out by Conoco-Phillips. Plus they moved them and the families financed the new house through the credit union.

One friend redecorated her foyer with some really adorable trim and repainted. A neighbors dog had come in their back door and chewed on their carpet so their house insurance paid for new. They repainted the whole house, etc...a LOT of work. They still sold it for the same amount of money they would have even if they had just left everything and set up a carpet fund.

One Realtor friend told me they were telling people to just take down the personal pictures and put them in their drawers. To not do anything else. Houses are selling for such a loss the buyers aren't even too worried about the decorations.

My sister redecorated her bathroom with a bold border that was kind of floral with a distinct black and white pattern behind it. She painted the walls and put new towels bars, they matched the border very well. She also repainted her kitchen and put up a rooster border. Her house value went down with each decoration. She was deciding what the new people would like and it was too personal.

So I think if you are already taking a loss on the house and if the company has to buy it if an offer is not made at the selling price, I would not spend much time packing and unpacking stuff. Minimize clutter by doing some 27 fling boogies off flylady.net. Get rid of stuff, don't pack it away just to have to unpack it...goodness that is just too much work.

Then as long as it is clean and tidy let it go.

I've moved a lot because of my dad's work, and more recently (a little over a year ago) with my husband's work, always through the company's re-lo company. We did not have to document every little thing. First, I went through and got things I wanted to keep with us and have access to immediately and at any time....and certain very special things that I just didn't want someone else responsible for, and they all went in boxes in OUR cars. The rest, the moving company packed up, labeled, crated, disconnected, etc. I was present in the home while it was all going on though, working on other projects (since we chose not to sell and were going to make it a rental property, while the house was being packed and loaded, I was having the heat/air guy inspect our system, had a maintenance guy in to do a couple minor things, and after the house was empty we had all the interior painted (with free touch ups for life) and finally a lady came to help me clean the house from top to bottom). They will stick it all in boxes and label it "master closet--shoes" or whatever. They place a numbered sticker that can be read by a scanner. You'll have to check off the paperwork using the numbered system or at least on the valuable crated items (we had a good bit of expensive artwork that they built crates for). The only thing we lost in our move was 2 moving blankets that were just thrown in last minute, not in a box, and were probably just confused as THEIR moving blankets. But that's understandable and we didn't even call them about it. It was a good experience. There WILL be some random boxes though and you'll be like "WHY is there canned corn with the baby's hat, a candle, and a roll of toilet paper?" That won't be most of the boxes, but I guess they had a box of left over little bits that didn't fit in other boxes...sort of a "miscellaneous" box. We had a few of those (out of hundreds of properly packed boxes).
If your home is going to be sold or rented out, I'd clean the house and take pictures (or have a realtor do it, if you don't have an eye for it) with your furniture still in it. That way on the listing sites, people see the house with furniture in it (looks MUCH better than empty rooms on a computer, lol). Then just move and take your stuff with you. However, there are a couple options for you and you should just price the options if your realtor thinks you should really stage: you can have a rental company come deliver furniture for you and pick it up again when you're done. You can have a staging company do it for you. One of our previous realtors staged homes and we saw a couple homes she'd done, so I know some of them do that too.
We made the mistake of moving before taking photos and the photos looked LAME online (I was annoyed at myself). Fortunately, the time and neighborhood was right and it was rented out in 5 days, and they stayed 16 months. When they moved, the house was rented again in 13 days and the lady was nice and let us go in and take some pictures of the house using her furniture for future listings....I feel we lucked out getting the tenants so quickly, but definitely wanted people who were shopping to at least have a picture in their head of what the house looks like when "loved". People do a lot of shopping and weeding out online so they don't waste their time and gas going to every house in the world. Online pictures are pretty important. A realtor may not agree, but I'm a SHOPPER and so are my friends. We'll see an empty house, and we're ok with it empty, especially if we've got a picture in our heads (or in our hands, printed off the computer) of what it "could" look like. But we're more likely to pass over a possibly great house in favor of visiting a great house that has great pictures. That's just my opinion. Good luck on your move.