Working with other stagers, sharing their accomplishments, work, inspiration and positive outlook has been the highlight of my job for the past 5 years.  I love being an instructor and mentor for so many. It's funny because I started my public life as a stager here on active rain, with an invitation by Craig Schiller.  I hesitantly wrote my first blog thinking, "Why on earth will anyone care what I have to say?"

I'm really glad I had a lot to say now.... 

Still, what I'm loving these days is getting to watch the students who have passed through our course have their say.  Seeing what they are doing and watching them grow and blossom.  It's an inspiring moment when you watch the student's surpass the teacher.  I couldn't be more proud - like a mom watching her kid's grow.

When we recently rebuilt our training website, Staging And Redesign, the one thing I really wanted was a place where we could showcase the work of our students.  I didn't want to just list their names and company information in a directory.  I wanted a place to show what they are doing - their staging work, their accomplishments, the things they are excited and proud of.

If you haven't had a chance to take a look at it, I would love it if you could.

Here are some of our recent blogs, student press and accomplishments (starting with perhaps one of my proudest moments, about one of my first student's Jessica Pirone).

2012 RESA Staging Company of the Year, taking a closer look!

Staging a home for sale: Birgit Anich Provides Staging Facts for Home Sellers

Donna Dazzo on Selling NY. Take a look at her latest appearance.

Sally Weatherley: St. Georges Penthouse Condo

Donna Dazzo: $37 Million Photo Shoot

SAR Graduate, Nickian Home Staging, Stages Trump Tower

3 Tips to Staging Your Home by Tori Toth of Stylish Stagers

Carole Morgan: Stage Right Designs: Celebrity House Hunters

There is just so much to be inspired by, at least for me.  I love to just watch the growth and development of people, businesses and the industry and I'm honored and grateful to have perhaps made just a little difference in some of it.

For SAR’s stager trainer, Karen Otto, consultations amount to 70% of her staging income in today’s real estate market.  Sometimes the service is paid for by the realtor, as a value-added benefit to secure the listing. Karen says that a solid 30% of those consultations turn into a full-fledged staging, and some home sellers just need one follow-up appointment for tweaking.  And so it was in the home below; and notice how dramatic the change is when an experienced, talented stager gets in the mix!

Step 1 was a two hour consultation.

The home owner took notes and felt he had a good idea of what needed to be done.  He depersonalized each space, put a lot of things away and did his best to add a few accents here and there.  Proudly, he stood back and waited for Karen’s team to return with a stamp of approval.

Step 2 was Karen’s Staging Redesign.

By swapping out furniture from one room to another, and adding minimal accessories (mainly in the office/library shelves) Karen filled out each room with dramatic results!  Notice how adeptly Karen has

• filled in open spaces without the rooms feeling cluttered,
• added color in measured proportion to draw the eye around the room, and
• used glass to add light to an otherwise matte surface like the brick fireplace.

It’s a masterful presentation of what looks like a very livable yet impressive home.

And the +1?

Professional Photographs!  It’s the color, the contrast, the clarity, the composition… so many aspects of great photos that take a stager’s excellent work over the top into magazine and professional design quality.  A poor photo can obscure even the finest work.  This is one little extra that is vital in today’s marketplace, especially if you’re in an area where you’re competing against New Construction.  Priced around $125 – 150 for 25 shots, most photographers will make a staged-home spectacular.  The fee is most often paid by the realtor.  If you, the stager, have to pay it, then try to find a new photographer or photography student looking to build their portfolio.  It’s worth the effort.

As to this home, everyone’s really excited for it to come to the marketplace.  It sure looks like a winner, doesn’t it?

The Texas Two-Step:  a consultation followed by a return tweak.  Do you offer this service in your staging business?  What’s been your experience?

This blog was written for SAR by Juliet Johnson, photos and interview with Karen Otto's Home Star Staging have been used with permission.  For more information about learning home staging with Karen Otto or to see more of Karen's staging work, please our home staging training page.

Angela Batchelor, RESA 2012 Staging Agent of the Year Finalist, has a frank discussion on talking to home sellers about staging their home.  In this six and a half minute video  you’ll watch her seamlessly overcome the most common objections sellers have about staging.

If you are a home stager, you’ll want to learn how to talk to your agents.  If you are an agent, you’ll learn how to talk to your clients.

This discussion is completely impromptu.  Several top stagers including Jessica & Rebecca Pirone, Annie Pinsker Brown, Melissa Marro, Karen Otto & Michelle Minch lead the discussion.

To watch the video click here.

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

Edit this post

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.