We've been in Home Staging for almost three decades. When we started in the 1980s, home staging was unheard of and explaining what we did was a really conceptual sell for most people. The conventional wisdom went like this:

1. Most people have too much stuff and no place to put it

2. Reason #1 is why they are selling the home in the first place

3. People would prefer to see your home empty so it doesn't look so claustrophobic

This reasoning led to the conventional wisdom that a vacant home was easier to show and showed better because it didn't have 'stuff' everywhere.

Thanks to HGTV and a rapidly growing home staging industry (home stager was listed as the top emerging career in the down market - see my earlier post about this topic) home staging is becoming more and more normal.

Because it is popular, training classes and 'certification' can be had for less than $250 and you can even take them online. This attracts all sorts of folks - Realtors who want to be more educated, part time people who like decorating and some serious business mided entreprenuers.

Because the barriers to entry for home staging are so low, there are no quality standards making it hard to tell who really knows what they are doing.

I'd put forth the idea that you should use 2 things to evaluate a home stager or home staging company:

1. What is their recent track record of selling homes?

2. What does their portfolio look like?

In an effort to help our team build trust and credibility with new clients, we started a flickr photostream of our work.

I think public flikr photostreams are great for getting your work out there and really help drive traffic to your company.Take a look at our flickr stream here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/showhomesphotos

Do you flickr? Have any direct experience using flickr to market via social media? Have comments on our work? Let me know!

Thomas Scott

www.showhomes.com