This post is an add on to the last two posts I wrote about purchasing furniture vs renting furniture and growing your inventory. I have had a lot of great feed back from those blogs but also a lot of questions about rental companies, their terms and their selection.

I think it is important first to discuss the relationship that stagers can form with rental companies and how it can help them to grow their businesses. The first step is to define what your needs are. I personally do not own my own furniture. I rely on my rental companies to provide the furniture, deliver the furniture and warehouse the furniture. In my business plan, I am not a rental furniture company- my job is the stage the house and their job is to provide the furniture. I then do no have the costs associated with dealing the with furniture.

That being said, the rental company that I use respects my role as a stager and is ONLY a rental company. They do not try to be a staging company. In all honesty staging accounts for less than 1% of their business. Before the staging boom rental companies mostly provided furniture to commercial office spaces, apartment communities and event planners- not the residential market that we stage.

The rental companies that I work with gets phone calls from Realtors and Home sellers looking to stage their homes themselves and avoid having to hire a stager. My rental company is completely upfront with those clients that they are happy to provide the furniture but they do not stage homes and do not have the sales people that can come out to their home and give them an estimate to stage it. THEIR SALES PEOPLE MAKE MORE $$ GOING ON APPOINTMENTS WITH CORPORATIONS THAN WITH HOME SELLERS. They often recommend that the people hire a stager to assist them. The rental company respects our business and does not want to bite the hand that feeds it (even though we are a small % of their biz)

As a small business owner I value this relationship and know that my salesperson will do all that they can to help me to service my clients. They want me to succeed- it is in their best interest, I AM AN UNPAID SALESPERSON FOR THEM!!!

As you may know our firm has stagers in 13 states along the East Coast and we are all experiencing different relationships with rental companies. In some areas I am also seeing the OPPOSITE from other rental companies. Some rental companies are advertising that they will stage your home! I know this may seem hard for some stagers to comprehend. How can a salesperson that is not trained to be a stager and does not have a design background or understand the marketing and selling of home stage a home?

The bottom line is that the smaller rental companies see staging as an opportunity to make $$ themselves and business is business. Last week I went on an estimate for a client and she told me that a rental company called her directly, made an appointment with her, came to her home and showed her a book of homes they had staged. She said that the rep told her not to hire a stager but to just select one of the rooms in the picture and that they would deliver and set it up for her. The client called me to tell me this and then hired them so she did not have to pay me for my time.

What do I think of this? Clearly I am disappointed. I can not compete with their marketing budget and their millions of dollars of inventory. My Realtors have told me that they have blanketed their offices with brochures selling their staging services and have even spoken to Realtors at the ASP Staging classes!!!

I feel that what I do to market and sell a home is different than just ordering a color by number room. I research the market, I understand the demographics of the area, and the target buyer. I form a relationship with the client and try to help them through the moving process. I am concerned with them getting more equity out of their home. I am confident that even with rental companies pursuing staging that my business will still grow. What I do as a stager is far different that what they are doing and the Realtors and sellers that I work with will see value in our services.

The thought for the day is how do we as an industry address this issue? For some the answer will be to only use their own furniture, for others like myself the answer is to use rental companies that respect our business model and relationship, for others (I HAVE DONE THIS) you can lie about the name of the clients so the rental company does not poach them, for others you can try to work for them as in house stagers (some of my stagers have done this)

I value my relationship with my rental company and could not do my job without them. They in turn offer my company opportunities to speak about staging, to work with their clients interested in staging, and to grow my business.

Please note that I have not named names, nor will I name names, but do the research and you will see what I am talking about. Any ideas of where we go from here? What will the future of this industry bring?