Free Guide Provides 7 Steps toGetting Started as a Home Stager!
7 Steps to Get Started in a
Career in Home Staging!
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CNN named home staging as an industry poised for growth!
81% of buyers say home staging makes it easier to visualize the property as their future home (NAR)
Staged homes spend 90% less time on the market (RESA)
Home Staging is an effective sales technique that integrates decorating with marketing and creates an experience for buyers
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“I really enjoyed taking this course. It is full of detailed information regarding all aspects of home staging from the basic “what is home staging?” to wall art hanging heights and what to look for in a home. I appreciate all the time and effort that went into the content of this course as well as all the downloads and personalized templates. I highly recommend it for anyone that is interested in home staging. I feel that I learned way more information than I originally thought would be included in the course and I completed it feeling confident in my knowledge and what was presented. The value for what you get it incredible.”
Nicole Pletz
RESP Graduate
“I enjoyed everything that I learned and Shauna Lynn, I think you are very confident and a great instructor. Thank you again for all of the knowledgeable information.”
Melisia Kelly
SLS Academy Student
“Attending SLS Academy was one of the best things I did for myself! Not only did I gain valuable information and the tools to become a successful stager, but it has given me the confidence to follow my passion. Thank you, Shauna Lynn, you have been such an inspiration!”
Since home staging as a career has gained additional exposure over the last several years, there are now more options than ever for home staging training. With so many options available, it can be difficult to choose which one is the “best” one to take. The answer to this question will depend greatly on what your goals and expectations are. There are several factors to consider in selecting the course that is right for you:
–How long do you hope to work in this new career for?
§Will they be there for you through the various stages of your business? What sort of support will they provide?
§If you plan to be in and out of the business in a short time-frame, will they help you with the exit-strategy?
§If you plan to make this your career for the next couple of decades, will they keep you up-to-date and current as trends and techniques change and evolve?
–Are you interested in expanding your services beyond home staging (i.e. home organizing, colour consultations, redesign services, and more)?
oIf yes, you’ll want to review what additional training they will provide you to ensure that you are properly equipped to provide these to your clients. Many courses offer advanced options in the areas of design, through continuing education, and others incorporate it into the home stager training course.
–Do you have any experience running a business?
oIf not, what sort of training will they provide you for managing the business, including registration, day-to-day operations, outlining your services and pricing, marketing, expansion, and more?
oAre they teamed up with resources that will help you to build and grow your business? Any reputable home staging program will have affiliates that they work with to provide you with valuable information, supplies, and discounts.
–How much time will the course take?
oThe answer you’re looking for for this question might not be what you think! The longer that the course takes to complete, the more comprehensive it likely is. Whether it’s an in-class or online training program, you’ll want to identify the time commitment before registering, to ensure that you are ready to make the commitment that it needs.
–What does the course content cover?
oWhat value will you get for your investment into your training? Review the type of information that you will learn, from home staging techniques, to design theory, to creating your systems and processes, and running the day-to-day business.
oWill they offer you templates and cheat sheets for starting your business, or will you be creating these yourself from scratch?
–What direction do you wish to take the business?
oDo you plan to own your own home staging inventory, or rent it? Do they teach you the differences, and help you to decide which is best for you?
oIs there a particular niche that you hope to specialize in? If so, what training do they provide in that area?
oDo you hope to add staffing to your business, or keep it a solo operation? How will they help with whichever direction you choose?
oSome courses will charge you a membership fee in order to keep your designation title, whereas others will charge you a fee to maintain your access to your training material. Be sure to clearly understand these fees upfront before investing, and ensure that you are prepared to pay them over the coming years.
–Who will be your training instructor, and what is their experience with home staging?
oAre they currently operating a home staging business, or have they operated one in the past?
oIf they are not currently operating a home staging business, when was the last time that they worked hands-on with clients?
You’ll notice that price was not mentioned as a factor here, but in truth it should be mentioned. The reason that it was not outlined as a deciding factor is that most reputable training programs will be comparable in price, and therefore this shouldn’t be a deciding factor. If a program is listed significantly lower than the others that you have researched, the chances are that the training provided will be sub-par (you’ve heard the saying that “you get what you pay for”, right?).
At the end of the day, choose the one that best fits your needs and your expectations. If you have questions, don’t be afraid to reach out to them and contact them directly to ask your questions. Heading down any new career path is a big decision, and one that you want to make carefully and purposefully.
Want to learn more about what it means to be a home stager, what you need to know to get started, what startup costs you should expect, and how the certification process works? Check out our upcoming Behind-the-Scenes Home Staging Career Training – register here.
Have questions about becoming a Home Stager, or just starting out and need an extra boost in your business? Join our Facebook group, To Be a Home Stager – our very own Shauna Lynn Simon is live online every Thursday afternoon, answering your most pressing questions!
If you work in interior design, you have probably noticed that a number of industry professionals have added home staging to their list of services in the last few years. Home staging can be a great complimentary service to a creative-based service portfolio, but how do you know if it’s right for you? What some may love about home staging, others might see as a deal-breaker and a reason to stick with strictly design.
I have met a number of home stagers over the years that began in the field of design, only to realize that their true passion was for home staging. That said, don’t be misled – while these two industries share a number of similar traits, there are just as many fundamental differences:
Let’s do a comparison:
As a Designer:
You work with a client’s overall style to create your design plan, based on their specific likes and dislikes.
As a Home Stager:
You work with a home’s overall style to create your staging plan, based on the neighbourhood, house characteristics, and buyer demographics. Your aim is to appeal to the largest variety of buyers possible.
As a Designer:
Projects can take several months to complete.
As a Home Stager:
Most projects are completed in less than a month from consult to completion, and in some cases they can be completed in just one week! Be warned – this instant gratification can be addicting.
As a Designer:
More is better!
As a Home Stager:
Less is more!
As a Designer:
The elements used to create a room are often a large part of the central focus of that room, including all furnishings and statement pieces, as well as the accessories and artwork throughout.
As a Home Stager:
Ideally, in home staging, you want to eliminate anything that could be considered a distraction in order to place the focus on the appealing selling features of the house. For this reason, statement pieces are often avoided in favour of more neutral selections.
As a Designer:
The goal of a project is to provide an attractive and functional space.
As a Home Stager:
The goal is to sell the house – therefore you are merchandising the home in order to effectively market it. While function should play a role, some comfort of living is often sacrificed to create the best overall look and feel.
As a Designer:
Personal elements help to create a comfortable home for the owners.
As a Home Stager:
Personal items are removed in order to eliminate this potential distraction. Buyers want to envision themselves in the space, and an overly personalized space can make this challenging.
Where Home Staging and Design overlap:
Proper furniture placement is critical to a successful plan. In home staging, standard placement rules apply as they would in design – in fact, in home staging, you’re often outlining for buyers the ideal position of items throughout the space.
Room flow is especially important when selling a home. Just as it can affect the comfort of a room for living, improper flow can easily turn off buyers without them even realizing it! The flow of a space can affect buyers on a sub-conscious level, and prevent them from placing an offer on the property.
Current trends are applied to both design and home staging plans. In home staging, these trends should be applied in the decorating aspect, and avoided in more permanent elements and fixtures.
A well thought out and cohesive plan will always create a warm and inviting space.
While there are many stylists that will cross over both industries, and enjoy the challenges that each brings, there are others that prefer to work in their creative niche and comfort zone. The diversity of offering both services can help to keep your designs fresh and fluid! Home Staging is a great complimentary service for design professionals, putting their natural talent to work with a quick turn-around and outcome. Let’s face it – eventually, design clients will sell their house, and that allows designers to easily turn these same clients into home staging clients. Whatever you choose, if you are passionate about what you do, you’ll find your way.
Interested in learning more about home staging? Check out Talent vs Training to see what your certification program should provide, and why formal training is critical to success in the home staging world, regardless of a design background.
Have questions about becoming a Home Stager, or just starting out and need an extra boost in your business? Join our Facebook group, To Be a Home Stager – our very own Shauna Lynn Simon is live online every Thursday afternoon, answering your most pressing questions!
So you have a creative eye, you love re-arranging your furniture, you’ve watched EVERY home renovation reality show, and you’re ready to launch into the world of home staging! Where do you start?
Since home staging is not a regulated industry, technically you can wake up tomorrow and decide to be a home stager and *poof* – you’re a home stager! But is that enough to sustain a career?
Talent is certainly key to a successful career in this industry, but it’s not enough to establish you as an expert, and it doesn’t mean that you can make it into a successful and thriving business. Training will help you with understanding the home staging processes, how to manage your clients, as well as some “techniques” for showcasing and merchandising a space. Home staging and home decorating are quite different, and understanding buyers and buyer perceptions, as well as how to effectively prepare a home to best showcase it will come through your training.
That said, not all training programs are created equal, so do your research and select the one that provides you with the most comprehensive information, as well as fits your learning style.
How to merchandise a home to make it a sellable product that your buyers will want to buy
How to “sell” – sell the house, sell potential clients on your services, and sell your home sellers on your recommendations (what good is it if you know what they need to do, if you can’t convince them to make the changes necessary?)
Home styling trends and styling tricks
Post-training support to help you to successfully launch your business
Current and up-to-date information regarding industry standards, trends, and expectations
Talent gets you started – it’s what drives you to turn a passion into a career, but it’s the training that will help you to properly hone your skills. Your certification also tells your clients that you are serious about home staging as a career – you are an expert in your field! The investment in the proper education provides credibility to you, and will be recognized by your peers as well as your prospective clients.
I’m a firm believer that you should never stop learning. Unless you already have a ton of experience running a business in the real estate industry, and you’re right at home working with and managing various types of clients, during one of the most stressful times of their lives, you’ll want to review your options for professional training!
Have questions about becoming a Home Stager, or just starting out and need an extra boost in your business? Join our Facebook group, To Be a Home Stager – our very own Shauna Lynn Simon is live online every Thursday afternoon, answering your most pressing questions!
We get it, you’ve watched all of the home renovation and home sale shows, read all of the online articles and tips regarding setting up your home to sell, and you have found every home selling checklist available online, so why would you need to take a home staging course? I have often heard future home stagers say that they shop for home decor all the time, they have decorated and redecorated their home a gazillion times, and my favourite, “I don’t need to take a course, I watch HGTV all the time, and I know that home staging is all about removing clutter and personal items.”
These reality shows have really put the home staging industry in the spotlight over the last few years, and have helped homeowners to better understand the importance of preparing their home prior to listing it for sale. But, while these shows provide the basics of what this preparation involves, they don’t provide the full picture of what it really takes to properly style and STAGE your home in order to evoke the emotional connection that your prospective buyers are looking for.
Every home is one of a kind, and it should be treated as such! You as a home stager are providing a value to your clients, so you need to show them that you are a trained expert, qualified to assist them with their home. Each home deserves the right attention with specific recommendations, geared towards their home, from an expert that specializes in doing just that, in order to highlight the home’s greatest features.
So what are these articles and lists NOT telling you? The following are just a few of the things that a trained home stager will learn, through our professional home stager training program, and many years of experience:
1. Where to place YOUR furniture so that the room remains open and inviting, while maintaining function and flow
This does not mean simply moving all of furniture to the edges of the room. This means understanding proper traffic flow, as well as the latest furniture styling trends. We help you to evaluate what should stay, what should be removed, and where to properly position furniture to optimize flow, eliminate awkward spaces, and highlight the best features of the room.
2. Shelf Styling
By far one of the trickiest decorating techniques to master, this is the art of filling the shelves to catch your eye, without diverting attention from the room. This means selecting the right size and style of pieces to compliment the space and the shelving unit, and understanding the balance between too little and too much.
3. Paint Colour selection
Just because a colour is popular or trendy, does not mean that it’s the best one to use when selling a home. Colours should be selected based on lighting, home style, and the colour of the finishes of the home. Sure, we all have our favourites, but each colour is selected to best suit the home.
4. How to find the best local trades to provide your clients with the best services, at the best value prices
A successful home stager will spend time forging valued relationships with highly skilled trades to ensure that all clients receive quality work, every time. Working with professionals will also allow you to build a reputation within the industry for your designs.
5. Where to shop for the final touches and accessories that your home needs
Home Stagers spend more time than anyone shopping for home décor items and finding the best deals. This is valuable information for your clients, regardless of whether or not they’re selling their home. Of course, the easiest solution for your clients would be to simply hire you to provide them with the accessories and accent pieces that their home needs. We’ll show you how to build and maintain your inventory so that it continues to bring in profits.
6. Which updates/upgrades will most benefit YOUR house in YOUR market, neighbourhood, and price range
Home Stagers not only evaluate what upgrades and repairs would add to the value of your home, but we look at what will help to increase it’s overall sell-ability – upgrades are not worth much if they’re not the right ones to entice the specific buyers of the home you’re working in. I once consulted on a home that spent a great deal of money replacing their kitchen, but for their target market, their funds would have been better spent doing other repairs to the home and minor updates to the kitchen. Understanding the value of each of these recommendations for every type of home, and the return on the investment into these, is critical to the success of any home stager.
7. How to make a bed
Forget what your mother taught you – making your bed before work, and styling a bed to sell a home are completely different! I can’t tell you how often we see this common mistake in listing photos.
8. How to utilize a piece of furniture for an alternate purpose
This does not mean putting an end table in an office and calling it a desk. It’s about thinking outside of the box when it comes to finding the right piece, often within your home already, to fulfill a purpose for a room and help to clearly define the space. A quality home stager provides solutions to their clients, especially when replacing all furniture with rental items is not an option.
9. How to enhance curb appeal
Yes, cut the grass, trim the trees, and mulch the gardens, we know that you have that covered. But there is so much more to exterior styling. If buyers are not engaged with the home before they get to the front door, your sellers could potentially lose out on that sale. We are property stylists, and we want to be sure to create an inviting space, inside and out.
10. How to maintain function and daily life, while living in a staged home
We understand that it’s not easy to maintain a show-ready home! Experienced stagers have seen it all and are prepared to provide clients with easily implementable solutions to help them to get through the day-to-day. Of course the best part is, in a professionally staged home, your clients won’t have to maintain it for long before it’s SOLD!
A Professional Home Stager provides the specific recommendations that will help to bring in the buyers and sell their clients home. Learn everything you need to know to be successful in a home staging career. You won’t just learn WHAT you need to be successful, but you’ll learn how to build on your experience, your knowledge, and provide quality service every time.
Have questions about becoming a Home Stager, or just starting out and need an extra boost in your business? Join our Facebook group, To Be a Home Stager – our very own Shauna Lynn Simon is live online every Thursday afternoon, answering your most pressing questions!
To learn more about our home stager certification training program, click here.
A glimpse at Shauna Lynn’s upcoming book! The following is an excerpt from the only home staging book of it’s kind – learn the truth about the home staging industry!
Expected release date: Winter 2017
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Most home staging courses will sell you on the big picture, selling you on the opportunity to put your creative style to great use by transforming homes and producing magical masterpieces, but the truth is that there is a lot more to it than that. While I list the following as the “cons” of the business, the truth is that they can actually be the best part of the business; they’re simply not the part that gets most new home stagers excited. I can remember the first time I booked multiple consultations on the same day – I had truly arrived! My business was really picking up, and I was getting more and more comfortable with each client meeting. I still wasn’t doing a great deal of larger projects, but I was enjoying watching these houses transformed, and I knew that I was providing a valuable service to these homeowners. I was establishing myself as an expert in my field, and homeowners and agents were taking my recommendations as intransigent. I was enjoying meeting the homeowners, learning their stories, and assisting them with preparing their homes, regardless of the scale that I was doing this on.
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The Cons (Things you may not be expecting as a home stager)
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Consultations are your bread and butter
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We all want the dramatic transformations, but every large staging job starts with a single consultation. Your main bookings when first starting out are generally owner-occupied home staging consultations. This means that the homeowners live in the house, and will continue to live there for the duration of the listing until the house sells, and it is your responsibility to advise them of the areas that they should address in order to increase the value and sell-ability of their home. In these cases, it is generally not practical to remove all of their current furnishings and accent pieces to replace them with the pieces of your choice. Ideally, it is best to work with what they have where you can, and replace only what is necessary. This means that walking into every consultation your end sale may only be the price charged for that consultation (depending on your location, this can range from approximately $150 to $400). In a consultation, you are simply advising the homeowner on what they should do, but you are generally not actually implementing the recommendations on their behalf. You may offer this additional service, but most will choose to simply do this work themselves.
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In cases such as these, it’s easy to feel like you’re not a part of the process the way that you had hoped to be. You’ll need to ensure that you provide the homeowners with clear direction for your vision, and some will interpret this information better than others. In most cases, you likely will not have a return visit prior to the formal listing of the house, so your opportunity to review the changes made will be through the online listing photos only. As your business grows, you may find that you are selling more and more additional services that will allow you to return to assist with the final preparations, but if it is not cost-effective for the client, they will choose to simply go it alone.
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Not every house is clean
This was actually incredibly shocking to me, though it seems like such an obvious expectation in this business. I had been in some not-so-clean houses growing up, but nothing prepared me for what I would see. I’m not talking about the houses that have too much clutter and piles of stuff everywhere, I’m talking about absolute filth. Socks are a part of my company’s dress code and must be worn for every client meeting. While my stagers may not always understand and appreciate this, they certainly do when they find themselves standing in a pile of dirt, beside the dirty diapers left on the floor, and whatever the dog has left behind. The most amazing part to me is that all-too-often the homeowners in these cases really don’t realize that this is not an acceptable standard of clean to their potential buyers. This requires a firm but sensitive hand, to help them to understand the importance of cleaning, what that standard of clean is, and how to get their home to a higher level of clean. An effective stager is one that is respected by their clients, while they proceed to tell them everything that is wrong with their house. If you can leave the home on your terms without having the clients toss you out, and still manage to get your point across as to what is needed to be done, you can consider your efforts a success. In my bartending days, I was known for getting the highest tip average from the guests that I cut off. It is not a skill that everyone can master, but those that do will find the most success.
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…to read more, you will have to wait for the release of the book! Stay tuned for details!
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Have questions about becoming a Home Stager, or just starting out and need an extra boost in your business? Join our Facebook group, To Be a Home Stager – our very own Shauna Lynn Simon is live online every Thursday afternoon, answering your most pressing questions!
art of filling the shelves to catch your eye, without diverting attention from the room. This means selecting the right size and style of pieces to compliment the space and the shelving unit, and understanding the balance between too little and too much.
and styling a bed to sell a home are completely different! I can’t tell you how often we see this common mistake in listing photos.
This was actually incredibly shocking to me, though it seems like such an obvious expectation in this business. I had been in some not-so-clean houses growing up, but nothing prepared me for what I would see. I’m not talking about the houses that have too much clutter and piles of stuff everywhere, I’m talking about absolute filth. Socks are a part of my company’s dress code and must be worn for every client meeting. While my stagers may not always understand and appreciate this, they certainly do when they find themselves standing in a pile of dirt, beside the dirty diapers left on the floor, and whatever the dog has left behind. The most amazing part to me is that all-too-often the homeowners in these cases really don’t realize that this is not an acceptable standard of clean to their potential buyers. This requires a firm but sensitive hand, to help them to understand the importance of cleaning, what that standard of clean is, and how to get their home to a higher level of clean. An effective stager is one that is respected by their clients, while they proceed to tell them everything that is wrong with their house. If you can leave the home on your terms without having the clients toss you out, and still manage to get your point across as to what is needed to be done, you can consider your efforts a success. In my bartending days, I was known for getting the highest tip average from the guests that I cut off. It is not a skill that everyone can master, but those that do will find the most success.