While I'm on vacation, some great bloggers are filling in for me with a few posts each day. The following is from Cindy at Staged 4 More:
When FMF first suggested this topic I was frankly a little hesitant to write it. I have been a professional stager for about two years now and have seen quite a few newbies who never took off in their businesses or stagers who left the business after couple years. It’s a high turnover business, like any job in the real estate industry. The main reason for such high turnover is that people don’t have the right expectations coming into the industry. HGTV has made it very glamorous and seemingly easy to do, but the daily grinds of running your small business, liability issues, administrative tasks, taxation issues, inventory upkeep, time management, personnel management, prospecting, marketing, PR, etc. can kill any aspiring professional very easily. I have seen quite a few jump into the industry and have no clue what they were doing whether in staging or running a small business or both, and consequently hurt themselves and their clients along the way. In the long run, that does hurt the industry and makes it difficult to work with clients sometimes when they have the misconceptions or already got burned by previous bad staging experiences.
That said, it is actually very easy to become a home stager, that’s why there is a significant increase of stagers in the current market.
Unfortunately there are neither ethics nor regulations that set standards for stagers. That means essentially anyone can print up a business card and set up a website then call herself/himself a stager. Working as a stager can be good money, as we have seen on shows like Million Dollar Listings where stagers charge $30,000 to stage a home (Although in general, that’s not the case. It varies by market.) It is also fabulous to work for yourself. It certainly is a creative job.
Here are a basic ways you can earn side income as a stager:
1. Write consultation reports: Consultation reports are basically DIY reports for the sellers. You visit the home, write down detailed notes and instructions for transforming their home, and have the homeowners stage the homes themselves. You can also include a visit so you can make sure the homeowners are staging it according to your instructions. Sometimes sellers don’t feel motivated to stage it so they may only do part of it. Unfortunately, the entire home is for sale, not just “part of it,” so it’s good to pay a visit to make sure they actually did what you said they should do.
2. Redesign homes to live/sell: Basically you come into the home and use their existing furnishings and accessories to stage. When sellers are strapped for cash, you gotta use what they’ve got. Many believe that staging is about moving all the furniture out and then moving in stager’s furniture. NO. Staging doesn’t have to be costly and I personally don’t believe that the sellers should spend more than they should to get their home sold. It’s a waste of monetary resources and everyone’s time. Sometimes when homeowners don’t have accessories at all, or theirs are outdated, I do bring in my accessories to style the homes. This happens when young couples know that they would be moving in couple years, so they purposely didn’t buy anything to decorate the starter condo/home. Or senior citizens who haven’t updated their homes while they live there. I also encounter sellers who have very personal décor, such as religious symbols, nude paintings, etc. where I generally will bring in home accessories as well to neutralize the home to appeal to a broader range of buyers.
3. Full vacant home staging: This is a whole new ball game. You can either carry inventory or use rental furnishing. When you carry inventory, you need storage and general upkeep. Shopping for inventory sounds great and all, but moving everything here and there can be gruesome and physically demanding -- not to mention the gas and car maintenance expenses. If you have inventory, you may also get a vehicle or rent. I move all my furnishing and accessories including sofa, love seats, coffee table, vases, bedspreads, etc. I have lots of bruises up and down my legs and have fractured a couple toes by accidentally dropping couches on my feet. When you use rental furnishing, your sellers may be less likely to pay for you to do it, or they will completely cut you out of the game. Rental furnishing is expensive. There are 2-month minimums and monthly minimums. In the San Francisco bay area, the cheaper furnishing rental company asks for 2-month minimum at $750 minimum per month, add 12% insurance and $175 delivery fee, that’s around $1800. And that doesn’t include the stager’s labor and accessories (rental furnishing companies generally don’t rent accessories like bedspreads, flowers, etc.). $750 doesn’t stretch a lot when you need to fully furnish a 2BR home. The couch alone will cost you roughly $180 to rent. Vacant staging is not for the faint hearted.
4. Cultivating other streams of income: The thing I love about my field is that there are a lot of options. You don’t have to just do these three things, you can extend your services to event staging, model home staging, or staging to live and work. The possibilities are endless.
It’s very easy to be over-zealous when you have a prospect in starting your own business. That’s why I am not going to sugar coat this profession. Many jump into the field feeling that they can automatically achieve high income. You can't. You have to work for it just like every other job. Donald had to work from the ground up, the same with Nordstrom, who started in the stock room. It is also necessary to have great business skills. You can be fabulous at what you do, but if no one knows about your services, you cannot succeed. After all, business is not going to fall from the sky. You have to work for it. You may also have to work weekends, which is very common in the real estate industry. This job is also very seasonal. During the peak season, I work 12-16 hours a day every day for weeks. During the slow season, I have absolutely no or very little jobs and I catch up on development of the business. When you first start, it may be difficult to get a job since you have no portfolio. To be successful at it, you need persistence, strong business skills and a sense of design. Just because you have a “flair for design,” which is by the way on every resume that I receive, doesn’t mean you will cut it in the industry.
If you are thinking about becoming a home stager, I would recommend to:
1. Talk to people who already work in the field IN YOUR MARKET. I get calls from stagers from New York, Ohio, Chicago, Seattle, and they ask me what to charge people because they don’t know. Well, every market is different. What costs $1500 in San Francisco will probably costs $890 in Ohio and $3500 in New York. Research the position and starter pay to see it is feasible for you to do on weekends. You want to work on weekends to supplement your income, find out if that works in your market. Generally open houses are big on weekends, the realtors will prefer you to finish everything by the weekend so they can have open houses. You may have to work nights instead of weekends to get those jobs done.
2. Even if you are only a part time stager, get insurance and make sure you are covered.
3. Figure out how much starter costs there are. There could be very little overhead if you are just working as a report writer and doing redesigns. However, life doesn’t work out that way. I set out to only do redesigns, and then all the calls were for vacant staging. I had no choice but start staging vacant homes because that’s all the market called for. And vacant staging is a lot more overhead (transportation, inventory cost and maintenance, storage).
4. Shadow someone and offer to work for free to make sure you actually like it. It looks really fun and cool on TV, but would you like to do it in real life? A friend of mine got featured by her local media once and she sent me the photos. I started laughing because they took photos of her in her best suit, all the photos were her placing a potted plant or some accessories on a table. In reality, I stage in sweat pants and t shirt. Sure I do style the home, I also move couches. I am not going to wear my best suit to move a couch! I also spoke with a real estate agent once who hated her job as a realtor, so she transitioned into staging because she loves interior design. Then she didn’t realize that she actually had to move furniture, so she went back to being an agent. It sounds really silly but it happens more often than we think.
5. Get staging education. True, it is not rocket science, but there is still some science behind it such as what colors will sell well, what furniture arrangement can create an open and welcoming flow, etc. There is also a lot misunderstanding of what staging is because of mixed media reviews. Just because you are a HGTV enthusiast doesn’t mean you can cut it in real life. The television program heavily condenses a 3-day project into 1 hour, which includes advertisements. There is a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind the scenes that we do not see as the audience. Staging education will also help you network with other new stagers and meet seasoned stagers. Having your own small business is lonely, so having a support network is always great.
6. If you don’t know what to do, be honest. Don’t use the trust of your client blindly. You will not only hurt your clients in the long run, you can also put yourself at risk for liability lawsuits. If you encounter a situation that you don’t know, find someone who does to subcontract under you or simply refer them to someone who knows how to do it properly.
A guy I used to work with is a home stagger.
Posted by: Minimum Wage | September 19, 2007 at 09:16 PM