I love hearing the success stories that Staging Diva Graduates send me. But while I hear many positive stories like one I shared about Nora Lakey in a recent post, I also hear from stagers who aren’t so enthusiastic about their new-found career as well as those who still haven’t taken the plunge to start their business months after they’ve taken their training.

One Graduate contacted me after being in business for only four months, ready to quit because there was no demand for staging in her large city. She had no website and didn’t list her business on the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers which is a very small monetary investment.

I asked her, “If a home seller in your city wanted to hire a home stager, how could they find you?” She admitted there was no way for anyone to know about her services.

So I then asked, “How do you know there aren’t thousands of potential customers in your area right now struggling to find a home stager with no way to know about you? The problem isn’t lack of demand, the problem is your business is invisible.”

Because part of what motivates me to provide home staging business training is my passion for helping others to follow their dreams, the worst kind of student for me, is one who doesn’t do anything with their knowledge. I received a note from a Staging Diva Graduate recently who had chosen a fabulous name for her company but had yet to get started for reasons she did not disclose.

The advice I gave her was similar to the advice I give all entrepreneurs who seem to be too scared or distracted to move forward with their dream: “There are always reasons not to get started because life happens. The trick of being a successful entrepreneur is to carve out the time to focus on your goals and more importantly to take action on them. Otherwise, life continues to fly by with all its distractions and inconveniences, but the core of it never changes until you change it.”

You wanted to become a home stager for a good reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have invested in training. If you’re a Staging Diva Graduate, check out the Staging Diva Network and Staging Diva Dialog; two programs that can help you stay on track after you complete your training.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Author of three home staging guides, Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 4000 Staging Diva students around the world.

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I’ve trained thousands of people to turn their decorating talent into a profitable home staging business, but after that training is complete, I have very little control over what people do with their new knowledge.

Ideally, a new home stager will take what they’ve learned about starting and growing a successful business and forge on; marketing their company, setting up alliances and getting clients.

Staging Diva Graduate, Sharon Charboneau of Upstaging Your Homes is an example of this type of new stager. She recently wrote to tell me about everything she’s been doing to grow her business in BC including getting herself online, forming alliances with local artisans and promoting her staging services through her own side line retail business selling home decor items.

After her website was finished, the designer she’d hired was so impressed with Sharon and her business that she’s hired her to stage her home and it just so happens, this website designer is friends with the agent who will be listing the house!

This is turning into a profitable project for Sharon and she’s been busy lining up contractors, assisting with painting and gardening, sourcing furniture, artwork and accessories while the homeowners carry out the renovations Sharon recommended.   This goes to show you never know where your next client is hiding and why you should never waste any time when it comes to getting out there marketing and telling people what you’re doing!

I hear many stories like this from enthusiastic new home stagers, but I also hear from those who fall into two different camps; those who don’t do anything to market their business and wonder why they’re not getting business, and those who just don’t do anything at all. I’ll post more about these types of new home stagers on Monday.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home staging training, home staging program, staging diva, marketing a home staging business, growing a home staging business, debra gould

Have you ever noticed how well-dressed the families are when “surprised” by Ty and the rest of the Extreme Makeover crew? What about the fact that everyone is always home the moment the bus pulls up and available on a moment’s notice to go on a one-week vacation?

I hate to spoil the magic, but these houses are being worked on for months before the cameras start rolling. It’s completely unrealistic to believe that an entire house can be demolished, rebuilt, painted and furnished in a week, but it makes for great television!

Like any form of “reality TV”, most decorating shows on HGTV, including those focusing on home staging, are pretty unrealistic.They’re more about “entertainment” then they are about “reality.”

While they might show a home stager going through and cleaning the house, painting the walls, buying the accessories and replacing the hardware and lighting fixtures, that rarely happens in the real world. Plus, few of us arrive with a complete crew including a seamstress to make custom window treatments and cushions on the spot, a carpenter to whip up a wall unit the same morning, or our own electrician!

Think about it. If these shows featured a solo home stager walking through a house telling someone what had to be done and then showing the final product it would be pretty boring to watch.

If you’re using those shows as a guideline for what you might have to do when you’re staging homes, don’t be too quick to assume you’re going to have to do everything yourself or that becoming a home stager means you’ll be physically exerting yourself every day.

If you arrange your business the smart way, you’ll be sourcing other people to do the heavy lifting for you and you can still make money from their services. You don’t have to lift a finger to do anything you don’t want to.

Think of your role as a home stager as being more of a creative director of the entire re-design project.

You have the vision and figure out what needs to happen to make it come to fruition. Put away those cleaning supplies, paint brushes and strategies for lugging heavy furniture around!

You can source the cleaners to give you a fresh canvas to start with, you choose the paint colors and recommend a painter to apply the color to the walls. If you feel the counter tops need to be replaced, you should have a contractor you can recommend to get the job done.

Home stagers come in all shapes, sizes and ages. The eldest graduate of the Staging Diva program is Jean Smith in Florida who is 76 years old. She’s having the time of her life but I can assure you she’s not moving furniture or cleaning floors, and neither do I. I’m 5’1” and a lot of the furniture that needs to be moved is bigger than I am, yet I’ve staged hundreds of homes.

Go ahead and keep watching those HGTV shows, they’re great entertainment and you might pick up design ideas. They’ll help inspire and motivate you in your career as a home stager, but don’t believe everything you see. If you’ve been holding off on starting your career as home stager because you think it will be too physical reconsider that faulty assumption!

The Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program teaches you how to build alliances with other service providers so you can focus on the creative work without the heavy lifting, yet still be ready to offer all the services your clients need at a handsome profit.

Stagers, if you have a great system that you use for your home staging projects, please share by leaving a comment. Aspiring home stagers will be encouraged by your examples and we all stand to learn from each other.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 4000 Staging Diva students around the world.

Technorati Tags: HGTV shows, home staging, home stagers, home staging television shows, staging diva, debra gould

Staging Diva Graduate, Patricia Ebrahimi, owner of Show-Smart!, is proving over and over again in Washington DC that home staging works.

In the month of May, Patricia staged five properties that sold in record time in her “slow” real estate market.

After staging two renovated historic row houses, they each sold for full price the first day after they were staged. One had been on the market for more than two months without any traffic.

This successful streak continued when Patricia staged a town house owned by desperate young sellers who were thrilled to accept an offer that came in within a week of staging. “This town home needed only two chairs, a table and lots of accessories to bring out its good features and bring on the buyers,” said Patricia.

Realtor, Marc Dosik, was thrilled with Patricia’s work when she staged an outdated property he had listed and it sold within a week for full list price. He said, “Patricia convinced the (elderly) sellers to remove even more outdated décor than I could. She first set them at ease, complementing their good taste when they decorated it in 1987. Then, speaking with the authority of an objective expert, Patricia explained the logic of appealing to the age of the average buyer in 2009.”

Patricia was also hired to stage a very small vacant ground level condo which had been on the market for over a year with no traffic and no offers. After staging, this hard-to-sell condo sold in 6 weeks at almost full price.

“The Staging Diva® Home Staging Training Program gave me the confidence to start my business and to charge enough money to make it worth my time and energy,” says Patricia. She adds, “Debra provided me with the business framework and marketing strategies to get the business going and make it work.  I had the talent, but had never started or run a business of my own. With Debra’s instruction, I was off to the races.”

It’s great to read continued proof that home staging works even in a slow real estate market. If you have experienced success like this please write me so I can feature you in an article like this one.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world.

Technorati Tags: proof home staging works, slow real estate market, staging diva, debra gould, show-smart!, home staging business, home staging training

I have a home staging project for a client in Cincinnati, Ohio. This home will be listed within 30 days and is currently vacant and undergoing renovations. This 2400 square foot home will have a list price of approximately $190,000. For the right home stager, this project is a great opportunity to completely transform a space bringing in all new furniture, art and accessories.

According to today’s statistics on Trulia.com, the average sales price in Cincinnati is $136,000. Given the desired list price for this home and what they’re already investing in renovations, this would be a highly motivated client.

It couldn’t be easier for you to apply for this home staging project. All you need to do is complete the form at the Staging Diva Home Staging Project Referral Service.

Please include “Cincinnati, OH Staging Project” for the project location in the first line of the form.

You must be a Staging Diva Graduate and have a professional Internet presence and/or a page on the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to be recommended for this position. The reason for the latter being, I can’t convince someone to hire you if they can’t study your portfolio.

This real estate staging project would be a fantastic addition to your portfolio and if you get any paid work through this referral, there will be a $250 referral fee which you can build into your fee or not, it’s entirely up to you. Don’t forget this is a vacant home so you’ll be providing furniture and accessories in addition to your real estate staging advice, so this should be a significant project that would more than pay back this fee.

Because of all the traffic generated by my many home staging websites, I get lots of leads on projects from all over the United States and Canada, and as far away as England, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, South Africa and Israel! I will only refer them to Staging Diva Graduates.

I generate tons of traffic for anyone listed on the Staging Diva site. Only one good project would more than pay for your entire Staging Diva Training Program plus building and hosting your web page on the high traffic Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers for an entire year! When clients find you from your listing in the Staging Diva Directory, I do not charge you a referral fee.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Home Staging expert Debra Gould also known as The Staging Diva is president of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company that is frequently profiled in the media in both the US and Canada. Debra Gould developed The Staging Diva Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging, real estate enhancement businesses.

Learn more about the Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program.

You can get your company listed in the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers. We build your page and all the code to help search engines find you!
Learn more about the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers

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Staging Diva Graduate, Kay Keeton, operates a home staging business in Dallas called Star Stager and she’s helping her clients sell fast and for higher than average prices even in a slow real estate market.

Kay’s recent home staging project was a property that had been rented and needed quite a few cosmetic touches to sell.

After hiring a team of cleaners to freshen up the interior, the home was painted and a landscaper was called in to take care of the yard.

Since bathrooms are so critical to the selling price of a home, Kay Keeton ensured these got special attention. In the main bathroom, the bathtub was repaired, new stainless faucets, towel racks and lighting fixtures were installed. A dated sliding shower door was replaced with a new curved curtain rod and new bath mats and towels were added for contemporary appeal.

Kay arranged for rental furniture for the entire house, hung art, added window treatments and bought all new bedding for all bedrooms.

When the agent looked at the house for the first time he was in awe. Kay says, “The home listed $35,000 higher than two real estate agents estimated the house would sell for prior to staging. Even though it was priced higher than other properties in the neighborhood, the first showing was scheduled two hours after the home went on MLS. The buyers agent who showed it said it was the best staging job she’d seen in 26 years of selling real estate.”

Home staging reduces number of days on market

After four showings, the owner had two offers. The house sold in just 41 days in an area where the average home in the area spends 205 days on the market.

This is even more impressive when you keep in mind that this was Kay’s first home staging job.

“I could not have done this without the step-by-step training that I learned from the five Staging Diva courses,” Kay said. She also commented on the Staging Diva Room-by-Room Client Planning Forms saying, “The worksheets for each room are priceless. It made everything so much easier as I went from room to room doing what Debra taught me.”

Kay also recently wrote to tell me that less than 24 hours after listing her business in the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers, she received her first call! Kay gets how to market her company and that’s going to put her light years ahead of her competition especially now that she has some great before and after photos and statistics to add to her home staging portfolio!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world.

Technorati Tags: proof home staging works, slow real estate market, staging diva, debra gould, star stager, home staging business, home staging training

I’ve heard people suggest home staging is actually a deceitful practice because it is meant to disguise real problems, but this is not the case.  Home staging is about letting a home’s best features shine through, not hiding serious problems that need to be addressed.

The entrance of this home says “fixer-upper” because of all the junk on the porch, overgrown hedge and peeling paint. But it’s actually a sound property that just needs some care to change the first impression from “fixer upper” to “welcome home.”

However, there are instances where home staging is sought after as a band-aid solution for much larger issues.

With certain properties it makes more sense for the owners to invest in repairs before staging and “home staging with integrity” means that the stager will point this out.

When a home is a true fixer-upper and has a long list of structural issues and obvious defects, no amount of paint or new furniture will disguise the problems.

If you’re asked to stage such a home, suggest that the owners fix what’s wrong before having it staged because any problems will be revealed in the home inspection anyway.

There’s a big difference between patching up cracked plaster and repainting after a leaky roof has been fixed, and doing the same to hide the fact that it’s leaking.

The roof issues will be uncovered in a home inspection so the home seller will be no further ahead, and may in fact watch their deal fall apart when it could have gone through had they addressed the issue in the first place.

As a stager, you should emphasize the need to fix the leak and why, and suggest once that’s done that the wall be repaired and painted. You’ll of course be picking the color, but that does not remove the responsibility of pointing out the steps that need to happen before any paint goes on the wall.

I once refused to stage a dilapidated house that had sat on the market for months without an offer. Instead of calling me, the vendor really should have called a contractor first.

I advised the client to either drop his price significantly and sell the home as a ‘tear down’ for land value, or to take it off the market during the summer, repair all the problems and then call me to stage it for the fall real estate market.

As a professional stager, you don’t want your home staging business associated with problem properties masquerading in nice paint and furniture.

There are plenty of solid houses crying out for cosmetic changes that can make all the difference in a real estate sale. Let your talents as a home stager shine on these. Don’t waste your time or reputation staging obvious tear downs, instead keep marketing your business and more clients will follow!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home staging training, home staging program, staging diva, professional home stager, home staging with integrity, debra gould

Nora Lakey’s story should be enough encouragement for anyone on the fence about becoming a home stager to go for it.

Nora wrote to tell me she had finally completed the final course of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program and shared her amazing success story with me.

Last June, Nora started taking the Staging Diva courses, one at a time. Since then (before even graduating from the program) her company Presentation by Design Staging Services has staged an astonishing 38 properties. Not only that, Nora was invited to participate in a real estate commercial explaining the advantages of home staging. That free marketing opportunity led to many jobs for Nora but her success story doesn’t stop there.

Nora was also invited to speak to a group of 70 real estate agents this month which resulted in several referrals and an invitation to speak to the group again! She’s now busy putting together a presentation of before and after photos to share with the same agents next month.

“It all began last year with a DREAM and Debra Gould’s Staging Diva Course #1,” states Nora. She added, “The dream has now moved out in front of me and I’m now trying to slow it down! I know I still have much to learn but I’m so glad Debra is only a keystroke away.”

I absolutely love hearing stories like this. If you’ve taken the Staging Diva courses and have a home staging success story of your own, please email me and I’ll write a story like this about you to give your business even more exposure.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world.

Technorati Tags: staging diva, debra gould, texas home stager, nora lakey, presentation by design staging services, home staging success, staging diva success stories

If you’ve never had to move with kids, it’s important to understand how stressful it is for a young family to sell their home. A child’s schedule is thrown off when showings coincide with bedtimes or meals. Cleaning and packing are extremely difficult to do around children and there are tons of other details that are all harder to take care of with kids involved than without.

As a home stager, it’s up to you to make a space as beautiful and easy-to-sell as possible. Anything you can do as a home stager to help make this happen will be especially appreciated by parents with children because of the ongoing difficulties of living in a show home while their house is on the real estate market.

It’s almost a full time job to keep a home in ’showing-ready’ condition for anyone, but babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers can’t grasp the concept of keeping their toys put away at all times. This is why it’s important for you to give the homeowners your best advice about staging a family home and to set up some good storage solutions for the children’s things.

Here are some tips you can use the next time you’re staging a home where small children reside:

• Encourage your clients to keep only one box of toys per child in the house. Make sure the pieces they keep aren’t things like Play-Doh or Lego which is impossible to clean up in a hurry for a last minute showing.
• Remove large items. Play kitchen sets and kid-sized furniture should be put into storage instead of taking up valuable floor space.
• Keep outside toys tidy. Remind the homeowners to keep bicycles and other outdoor toys stored neatly and not strewn across the yard as well – you never know when a drive-by will happen.
• Use attractive storage for remaining toys. A good way to store and showcase the toys that are staying while the house is listed is on a cubical storage shelf with canvas baskets in the family room or child’s room. When toys are organized this way it’s easier to clean up in a hurry.

You’ll find more home staging tips like this in the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans.

The presence of toys  probably won’t turn off a buyer without children or a plan to have them, but keeping things tidy and preventing toys from overwhelming the home will help increase the property’s appeal.

If you want to be remembered by the family whose home you’re staging, give them this tip for moving with children:

When packing, put a toy or two in every box so the kids are excited about unpacking and the parents have their cooperation while getting the boxes emptied.

Do you have any favorite tips for staging a space where children live? Please share by leaving a comment below.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould developed the Staging Diva Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging businesses. There are currently over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates around the world. Debra created the Staging Diva Ultimate Design Guide: Home Staging Tips, Tricks and Floor Plans to provide design direction to home stagers feeling they need it.

Technorati Tags: home staging for a family, home staging, home staging tips, home staging and children, staging diva

All graduates of the Staging Diva Training Program are asked to complete a survey about their training and I am especially proud of the results I’ve been seeing of late. There’s one statistic in particular I feel is important to share:

20% of those who enroll in the Staging Diva program have already completed a training program that did not meet their needs.

If you’re planning to invest in a home staging training program, you must know whether or not the program you’ll take will give you the skills you need to actually operate a successful home staging business, in other words, find out if the program you choose will teach you how to make money.

I receive so many emails and phone calls from stagers who have come from other programs that this number doesn’t surprise me. The people I hear from have no idea how to get clients or how to properly charge for their services. This is because other home staging training programs focus on the design aspect of becoming a stager rather than the business side.

Staging Diva Graduates learn how to run a successful staging business so instead of having a hobby, they end up learning how to actually get clients and make money from their decorating talents.

Nobody wants to waste money, especially in this economy, so it’s important to do lots of research when choosing a training program. You don’t want to be faced with disappointment in the end when you realize you don’t have the skills you need to make a living doing what you’d dreamed of.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home staging training, home staging program, staging diva, staging diva graduate, debra gould