Speaking Up about Home Staging

Who doesn't love a good inspiration for design and home staging? I know as someone in the industry, when I find someone's website, the first place I go is to their gallery.  Don't we all do that?  I thought I would share a place where you can find hundreds of beautiful home staging photos you've might not seen yet...

Photos like this one from Jessica Pirone of Just Perfect & More home staging in Wilmington, NC...

or these photos from Karen Otto of Home Star Staging in Plano, TX...

Matthew Finlason has shared his entire "The Stagers" gallery with us.... 

With still more photos from Annie Pinkser Brown, Linda Barnett, Michele Kurelich, Janine Varney, , Michelle Molinari, Bernadette Flaim, and more..... With hundreds upon hundreds of professionally taken, stunning photographs, how could you be anything but inpired?

And if that's not enough for you, be sure to check out our Student Press area where SAR Graduates share their staging work... like this one from Birgit Anich Staging & Interiors

or this one from Carole Morgan's Stage Right Staging

Or this beautiful one from Sally Weatherley & Exit Stage Right...

So, if you want to see more gorgeous and inspirational photos, be sure to visit the blogs and galleries at StagingAndRedesign.com.

The idea of becoming a home stager and running a successful home staging business can be exciting, horrifying, thrilling, daunting and overwhelming.  Bringing your passion into a new business can be like giving birth to a child.  Just like children, businesses will grow, change and if you do it right, take on a life of their own, able to function in society without you.

The biggest challenges for new businesses are:

• trying to do everything yourself
• not having a plan
• thinking you are working when really you are just shuffling papers
• creating functioning systems
• not putting in the hours you need to succeed

I’ve added the Staples, “Dave” commercial, to this blog because I laugh everytime I see it.  How many business actually operate that way?  Small ones do, big ones don’t.  Which leads up to 2 more questions.  

1. How do you create time to do everything needed when you don’t make enough money yet to hire help?
2. How do you grow from the one man operation into the full fledged big scale business where you don’t have to be like Dave?

Goal: business growing up & being successful without you

In this new series, I’ll attempt to answer these questions, to offer solutions to your growing pains and to help rear your infant to a toddler, then to an adolescent, then you’ll find it will fight you for independence and you’ll have to slowly learn to let it go – to succeed in the world with out depending on you for everything – though you’ll always be important. 

Follow up blogs:

Becoming a Home Stager: How to Run a Successful Staging Business: Part 2 Team Blueprint

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I can already hear all of the current home stagers snickering at this saying because we hear it all the time.

Wow!  I’ve seen that on TV, it looks so exciting and glamorous!”

Matthew Finlason from The Stagers

Being a home stager has been an inspiring and exciting profession.  I’ve loved getting intimately involved with the real estate market, understanding it’s ups & downs, networking with both my real estate and staging peers, many of which have become good friends, and having the creative outlet of working with both my own inventory and the clients.  The one thing I’ll say about this career though, it is anything but glamorous!

On TV we’ve seen home stagers dressed in fine apparel, pointing their fingers to movers and assistants and then magically “ta-da” everything is in it’s place.  Seldom do we get to see the nitty gritty work; you know, the marathon shopping, the schlepping, the lifting, carrying and hanging that starts early and ends late.  Unfortunately we don’t get to hang around with hunky carpenters, or gorgeous hosts who can make anything look good.

No one mentions the hours we spend pulling our hair out trying to figure out the latest and greatest update to our email accounts, smart phones, wordpress sites, accounting programs, photo editing programs or newsletter accounts. They don’t show us tethered to  our data plans as if they were life support systems – knowing that when it’s your company, you are never really ‘off’.

Still – I couldn’t ask for a profession I would like more.  While what we do isn’t glamorous, it is rewarding.  It is fulfilling. It is creative. We do make a measurable, marketable difference – and that’s exciting!

You see, the smirk we stagers wear when someone says how ‘glamorous’ our work is, happens to be there because we know thatwhile glamour is definitely not part of the job description – it is pretty cool.  We are pretty lucky.  We do think you should be a little envious of the fact that we get to make a living doing what we love…

This blog was written and reprinted by Melissa Marro, one of the industries most noted professional home stagers, who now runs Staging & Redesign, a training company.  PHOTOS were used with permission by Matthew Finlason, who offers an exlcusive Advanced Design & Marketing Course exclusively through SAR.  To see more of Matthew’s photo diary of The Stagers, visit his website, MatthewFinlason.com.

Jersey City has become one of New Jersey’s trendiest neighborhoods especially down by the water.  With views of the Manhattan skyline and convenient, regular ferry service to the World Financial Center, the target buyer for the gentrified townhouses and condos tends to be Wall Street Gods-In-Training and down-sizers looking to be closer to New York City’s cultural options without having to sacrifice the peace and calm of the suburbs.

Since this townhouse had lots of stairs, Bernadette Flaim and Susan Corbo, of Attention2Detail, opted for a young professional couple or singlet as their target buyer and set out to create the perfect cocoon for a future “Masters of the Universe” titan. The house came with a boat slip and direct water views. It was also “fully lived in” and clearly out of date, with lots of brass and Lucite.

Not knowing exactly where the realtor was going to price the property, the team worked with the seller to upgrade the obvious things – fresh paint, stainless steel appliances, refinishing the wood floors and a new carpet on the 3rd floor in the media room. The kitchen was dated, but realistically, those guys don’t spend a lot of time cooking anyway. There’s not a lot of time for cooking in a 75 hour week!

Contemporary with a subtle use of color, Flaim and Corbo decided their buyer would need a place to chill more than party. In a business of first impressions, the Living Room was the room a buyer would see first:

Soothing greens, geometric shapes, strategic use of bright orange and a whimsical mirror – to perhaps advise no-one take themselves too seriously – this space scores just the right tune. The orange leads your eye to the WOOD FLOORS, the brick facades across the WATER VIEW and to the FIREPLACE.

How many times in marketing do we get told to show rather than tell?

Notice what is NOT here: today’s ‘Wall Street Journal’, a calculator, movie posters of ‘Margin Call’, ‘Wall Street’, ‘The Boiler Room’…Adam Smith’s ‘The Wealth of Nations’ etc. Instead, you find a massive bed with 5-star hotel-style appointments and the subtle Greek God (David) with a stack of old books for provenance and portend.  Upstairs, the media room is now about cameras, sailing, spectacular and precious shells…many, many Wall Streeters head to the beach as soon as it’s warm, whether it’s for ‘Revenge’ in the Hamptons or ‘The Jersey Shore’.

And yet…

The home did not sell, so far. Instead, all the foreclosures and short sales sold all around it, almost as if this property showed what these types of homes could look like. It turns out the listing price was $150,000 over asking. A strategy the realtor had used to get the listing?  What the seller suddenly needed to get out of it to make him whole on his initial investment? Enthusiasm from the [dramatic, eye-popping] staging making them use New Construction as a comp?

As stagers, we are unlikely to know for sure.  But it does raise a controversial point that any seasoned stager knows: we have to be involved in the pricing discussion if our interpretation of “value” is to be of any worth.  There’s nothing wrong with aiming high on price, so long as everyone understands that in so doing the selling time will be longer. The staging contract has to last long enough for all the other homes on the market (including distressed properties) to sell first, and endure multiple price reductions, no matter how small or drastic (to counteract the length of Days On Market).

In this particular case, the home is now empty as the price adjusts. Never the best environment for any property to sell, least of all for someone who wants to “see” themselves starting on the stairway to heaven!

* ~ *
Photography:  Ryan Damiano, Front Door Photography

This blog is a reprint from Staging And Redesign Training.  It has been copied with permission.  To view more staging and redesign blogs please visit their website, StagingAndRedesign.com.  Bernadette Flaim is an instructor for Staging & Redesign.  For more information or to be mentored/coached by Bernadette, please visit her page.

SAR Instructor Jessica Pirone, owner of Just Perfect & More, a home staging company in Wilmington, NC show exactly how powerful staging can be in the sale of your home.

For more information about Just Perfect & More, visit their website.  If you are thinking of becoming a home stager, or would like to be coached/mentored by Jessica, please contact her directly.

*Math consists of comparing cumulative DOM and % of list price received on our clients property (based on time of staging) to that of it’s surrounding competition.  After these calculations are made, we also calculate a generic mortgage rate for a property with that list price using a standard formula found on a mortgage website and we use that in the calculations of amount saved as well.

Thanks Craig! This was extremely helpful info for those of us mourning piknic. I just downloaded Picassa on my new computer yesterday, so I will be exploring today!

Becoming a home stager and earning a six figure income seems so easy when you listen to some training companies talk about it.  Now, I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it’s not what some trainers will tell you.  Ask any full time professional home stager and they are more than happy to talk about income with you though.

So, why would I, a professional trainer and owner of a successful home staging training company want to tell you that it’s not a cake walk?  Because I want successful students in my classes.  I don’t want to just earn a nice pile of cash for duping people out of their savings.  I remember my industry peer saying early on, when I first started training, that all the training companies were just there to “make a quick buck.”  I had to constantly defend myself and let them know that I was a real stager too and I “got it”.

Still to this day we hear rumblings inside our industry against the training companies because they spend so much effort asking the newly trained stagers to sell their brand, to buy their pens, clipboards and stickers, or worse yet, sully their newly forming reputations by hocking “home care” products like green cleaners or air purifiers to clients.  Newly trained stagers are often left wondering how they will ever earn their tuition back in the hard hit economic markets of today.

For those who are reading that are wondering the same thing…. I’ve got some news for you.  Staging can be a GREAT business.  It can be VERY profitable and you can make a pretty comfortable living from it.  I do think you need to separate the fact from fiction, however.

I earn over $100 an hour as a home stager.

Yes, that is true…. except for one tiny detail.  That’s the BILLABLE hour rate.  For most home stagers, their billable hours are only about 25-35% of their total work time.  To put this in perspective, the average 40 hour a week home stager can only actually bill for about 10-12 hours of that time. The rest of it is spent doing things like marketing, billing, packing, writing reports, and so on.

Building a team will help you increase your number of billable hours and in turn, increase your overall income.  Of course that comes with additional overhead too.

I can earn a full time paycheck with only part time hours.

When was the last time someone said that who wasn’t trying to sell you something? Typically if it sounds too good to be true, then it is.  Home Stagers have to work when the clients are available.  We have to be available when rental companies, movers or other demands require.  Again, if you only have nights and weekends available, or only want to work when the kids are at school, then you may have to consider adding on help or set up a referral base for clients who cannot work around your schedule.

You still have to fit all of the demands of the job into your part time schedule. The general rule of 25-35% billable hours is still true.  If you can only dedicate 20 hours of work a week, then you will only get paid for about 5-6 of them.

My training company will list me on their directory and then jobs will come pouring in.

Uh huh… You will get the occasional referral from  your training company.   Virtually all paid staging jobs, however, come from building relationships with agents and sellers in your area.  Your training company can’t do that for you.  Your training company, should however, teach you how to begin doing it.

All I need are a few clients and my business will run itself.

This one is nearly true to be honest.  My partner and I ran a staging company in Charleston (before I sold it to her earlier this year).  Our annual sales were mid six figures and we really only managed about a dozen regular clients between us.  Those clients would refer other agents, some who became regular clients, others who were occasional clients.

Still, the company didn’t run itself.  We still had to have a team to help keep up the day to day operations.  We still needed to put out newsletters, update our websites, blogs and network with those agents.

So, what’s the point of all of this?  Surely it can’t be to discourage you from getting into an industry that I now make my income from getting you into.  Hopefully, it is to open your eyes a little.

Becoming a home stager can be a completely fulfilling and profitable way to do what you love.  But be prepared for a lot of hard work.  It’s all the things that current working stagers are all too quick to tell you about and training companies try to minimize, that make the biggest difference to your success.

You won’t make a profit overnight.  No REAL BUSINESS does that.  It takes time, energy and work.  It takes a plan, marketing and resources.  If you play your cards right though, if you do what the successful ones before you have done, learn, listen and act – then you just might find the best is right at your fingertips.

The staging industry is still in its infancy.  We are still feeling our way along.  A few pioneers have started a path and now we watch and wait for the newcomers to pave it. The question is…. do you have what it takes?

This blog is a reprint by the same author from StagingAndResign.com.  Photos are from Karen Otto's A Day in the Life of a Stager Gallery.  For more staging blogs, please visit StagingAndRedesign.com.

Are you thinking of becoming a professional home stager?  With the current economic market owning your own business makes a lot of sense for many, for others not so much.  I’m frequently asked about making money in the staging & redesign industry, how many hours it takes and what kind of initial investment is realistic.  The next most common question is either about market saturation or the downturn of the housing market.  I would like to take a few moments to answer these questions.  I want to begin with the hardest question first.

What kind of investment is realistic when starting my home staging business?”

I suppose there is no set standard on this but at least part of that question has to be, “How soon do you want or need to make a paycheck?”  If you can forgo a paycheck for a while, then you can make a smaller initial investment and reinvest your earnings to grow and develop.  If, however, you need to replace a current paycheck, then you’ll need to invest at least $5000 – $10,000 on initial operating expenses (training, websites, business cards, tools, marketing, some light inventory – plants, art, knick knacks, etc).

If you want to have your own vacant staging inventory and plan to work with vacant homes, the investment will need to be significantly higher, spent throughout the course of the first year or so in business.  Furniture rental companies are a great resource if you do not want to make that kind of investment.

Can I be a part time home stager?”

One of the greatest benefits of owning your own business is the ability to set your own hours.  You can work with clients while the kids are at school and then do your marketing and bookkeeping at night when they go to bed. You can work around another job.  The important things to remember when determining your hours is that this is a service profession.  This means that you will have to work around your client’s schedules as well as within your own. If you are not available when they are, you’ll  need to have a team member who can be available, or someone to refer that business to.  It will help ensure you keep the best reputation.

You should also realize that part time work equates to part time pay.  I’ve heard far too many times from other training companies expounding on how to  make full time income on part time work.  The fact is that just isn’t true.  You may only work in the field a few hours a week, but there are all kinds of other aspects of the business that take up non-billable hours that you must work in order to be successful.

How much money can I expect to earn as a home stager?”

This is pretty tricky.  There are so many variables, but let me put some basics out there for you. The average home stager in the US and Canada earns approximately $75-$225 per billable hour.  The billable hour average is approximately 25-35% of your work week.  Stagers also earn an income renting out accessories and inventory for both occupied and vacant properties. Consultations, shopping and staging fees make up most of our billable hours.

Let’s look at a fairly common work week for an average new stager:

2 staging consultations + 1 staging day

Taking the median price of $150 per consult and approximately 5 hours of time at median rate of $125/hr = $925/wk income @ 7 hours of field time.  This, believe it or not, is about all you’ll have time for in a full time (40 hr) schedule without assistance.  You will also need to account for some expenses: a consultation program, marketing materials, website hosting fees, etc.

Adding in assistants, administrative staff or team members will increase your income.  As your business grows, your annual income will also grow.  While your expenses will also grow, they should grow at a smaller rate than your income growth.

With the downturn in the housing market, is a career in home staging still viable?”

One of the beautiful things about our industry is that as the internet becomes a bigger and bigger resource to consumers, staging becomes more important.  As sellers have more ability to discount or turn away homes by the photos on sites like Realtor.com, Zillow or Trulia, the need to have perfectly staged homes goes up.

A general rule of thumb in our market is that when the market is hot, we help sellers get higher offers.  When the market is soft, we help them save time on market and compete with all the other homes on the market.

Is the home staging market over saturated?”

I sort of laugh to myself whenever I hear this question.  Let’s just talk numbers for a moment.  I’ll use the relatively smaller Charleston, SC market since it is the one I am most familiar with.  According to the Charleston Trident Muliple Listing Service (MLS), last year averaged over 11,000 homes on the market every month in 2011 (Not new listings, just how many homes were actually on the market that month.  A home that was on the market all year, was counted in each month.) There were also approximately 4500 local area agents.

Can you imagine how many home stagers it would take to service all of our market?  While our company was one of the largest home staging companies in the country, we averaged only about 35-60 homes staged at any given time (simultaneously).  That still left over 10,900 homes we didn’t get to.  If we assumed there were 20 other staging companies our size in our market (which there weren’t), that would mean that all of us still left just under 10,000.  Trust me – almost no market is over saturated.  Very small towns may only need a couple, otherwise, we are not even close to our potential.

I hope this article helps put staging as a career in perspective.  The important thing to remember isoperating like a business, working on marketing and relationships when you don’t have actual staging work makes all the difference.  Your business can be whatever you want it to be, but you’ll need to be somewhat realistic with your expectations – then develop ways to exceed them along the way.

This blog is a reprint from StagingAndRedesign.com by the same author.  To view more staging related blogs, please visit their website.

Rugs are one of those design elements that can really make or break a room.  Kathy Neilson, with the help of World of Rugs, shows diagrams that can really help understand the impact they should make.  Remember that anchoring is essential!

If you own home staging inventory, you probably are asked, at least on occassion to sell your furniture, artwork or accessories.  It's difficult not to.  After all, we create spaces that both the buyer and seller love.  It's not the least bit uncommon that we've dialed in the buyer so well that they feel it should come with the house.  The part that never quite gets funny is when they seem to view it as "used furniture".  I suppose their view is that it's not new from a store, therefore we should sell it at a drop dead discount (read garage sale pricing). 

Recently, I had a customer call about a sofa that was in the home they were purchasing.  It was a great little Haverty's sofa.  It sold at a bargain price of $699 in the store.  When I told the seller that we would sell it to him for $699, what was charged in the store he was shocked.  I carefully explained that typically not only do we charge the cost of the item but typically add on a shopping and delivery fee and the only reason we would consider selling this at cost was because we already have a duplicate one. 

This particular buyer called me seven - yes seven (7) - times to ask about this sofa.  He really wanted to buy it for $400, but would go as high as $499.  You know, if only we could be reasonable.  It is after all "used" furniture. 

This may actually be one of my most frustrating moments in the job.  I'm not sure exactly what buyers think, but one illusion they really need to get beyond is the fact that the items in these staging jobs are NOT gargage sale prices.  Last year my company spent over $80,000 in inventory, and this was the least amount we've spent in a year yet.  We carefully choose the items that go into our staged inventory.  We pick them based on overall appeal, ability to work in multiple styles of homes, quality and durability (to handle the moves, not so much people living on them).  Once they are in a vacant home, they sit.  No one sits on them, or at least it's unusual.  They may have a bump or bruise from multiple moves, but really, it's still pretty much new. 

Buyers, if you buy my sofa, rug or artwork, I have to replace it.  That costs me money and TIME.  Just like any other business, I'm going to charge you for that.  If you don't want to pay retail, don't ask the stager - go to a garage sale or thrift store.  Still, you'll have to figure out how to get it home.