When I first started my home staging website in 2002, there were no social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and there was no such thing as a home staging blog.

Back then you could put up a fairly static website. It was still important to keep it fresh by adding new pages to keep Google happy, but there wasn’t this pressure to come up with new content week after week the way there is now.

This week’s home staging business dilemma comes from Loi, who asks:

“Is it advisable to use the same content for Facebook and Active Rain or Blogspot at the same time? Just thought it might be easier to track whether content has been used already and maximize it at the same time.”

Home stagers, please share your own thoughts and experiences on this topic by commenting below. I’ll pick the best and add mine and write a follow up post of recommendations for all of you!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®

Home staging and marketing expert 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 7,000 Staging Diva students across the United States, Canada, Australia and 18 other countries around the world. Debra is the author of 5 guides and is frequently profiled in the media.

As you look for ways to boost your home staging business, it’s hard not to notice the For Sale signs in your very own neighborhood and wonder if they don’t offer a home staging marketing opportunity.

Many home stagers ask me what to do about houses that are already on the market. Should you approach the real estate agent who has the listing, or the owner of the house to promote your home staging services? And how long should you wait after you see the house go on the market?

Home stagers, I’d love to hear your advice and points of view on this home staging business dilemma. Please add your thoughts and I’ll summarize the best and add my ideas in a future post.

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Voice of Possibility Group Inc.

Intrepid entrepreneur, 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 7,000 Staging Diva students across the United States, Canada, Australia and 18 other countries around the world. Debra is the author of 5 guides and is frequently profiled in the media.

This is  part two of a series. You can catch up at 5 Reasons You Need a Home Staging Blog to get some more of the basics and also read some helpful tips and comments from home staging bloggers in the Staging Diva Community.

Today I’m going to tackle where you build your home staging blog. Many new bloggers start out with a free one on wordpress.com, blogger.com or activerain.com.

These options are attractive because you can get started right away with their templates and best of all, it’s free! Really you just need to decide on a name for your blog, open an account and within minutes you can be typing the content for your first blog post.

I confess that’s exactly how I got started. I first used Blogger in 2005 after taking a course on how to get started in blogging. Blogger is owned by Google so a cool side bonus is their spiders are going to visit and index your content pretty quickly. If you have a blog with an address like stagingdiva.blogspot.com, then you’re looking at a Blogger blog.

No matter where you build your blog, it’s important to know that every post has it’s own unique URL. Each category of post also has a unique URL This is a good thing because every URL represents another page that Google and the other search engines can “index.” When you look at my blogspot posts for June, 2005, they’re at this URL http://stagingdiva.blogspot.com/2005_06_01_archive.html.

The same thing happens on Active Rain. For example one of my 2 blogs there is at: http://activerain.com/blogs/thestagingdiva. An individual post will have an address like this one: http://activerain.com/blogsview/2604711/ladies-is-that-voice-in-your-head-killing-your-business-

Would you build a house on land you didn’t own?

I’m trying to keep this explanation as tech-free as possible, but stay with me because there’s a really key insight coming! Look back at these addresses. They all have “blogspot” or “active rain” in them because they are built on someone else’s “property”, ie: domain.

In other words, no matter how long I blog, I’m building up “Google Juice” for another website, not my own!

I don’t own any of these pages. Google could decide to cancel their free blogspot service or Active Rain could decide to start charging me an arm and a leg for their blogging capability and I’m stuck!

Imagine if you only posted twice a month for 5 years? That would mean you’d have 120 webpages disappear overnight along with all of the content! If you posted the recommended minimum of once per week during that time, you would lose 260 webpages. Actually more because remember I said that each post and each category get their own URL? Imagine, all those pages with your name or company name on them (that you currently delight in seeing) in Google searches suddenly gone— poof!

It was not a happy day years ago when I realized this because I had hundreds of blog posts. I buried my head in the sand for awhile wishing I hadn’t learned any better. Then one day I decided to bite the bullet and start from scratch again. You see the longer you wait, the worse it gets!

Watch for part 3 in this series. I’ll discuss what you can do if you find yourself in the situation of having a blog that’s not on your own domain. In the meantime, check out my home staging blog that’s on my own staging website. As you visit the different blog pages, notice the URLs at the top and how they’re filled with keywords that help Google find Six Elements and know that it’s a home staging company.

I’ll confess upfront that I’ve neglected to update my Six Elements blog since I’ve been so focused on Home Staging Business Report, where I generally post 2 to 3 times per week. It’s really hard to keep up too many blogs at once, no matter how good your intentions!

I have also maintained more than one blog on both Active Rain and Blogspot for SEO reasons, but they are not my main blogs. They are not where my original content goes and if they disappeared tomorrow, I’d still have all my content safely sitting on my own domains continuing to:

• Boost my search engine rankings
• Build relationships and educate others
• Bring me paying clients

After all, that’s why you’re blogging isn’t it? Please share your questions and comments below to help me know what I need to cover in upcoming issues in this series.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years, she built her first website in 1999 to sell her artwork online; which attracted a book publisher and helped her sell her first painting to an in

This was the condition of the living room when I arrived to conduct a home staging consultation. I’m standing on the stairs for a bird’s eye view of the scene for you.

By the way, that’s a great home staging portfolio photo tip for you. You can get stronger before and after photos to showcase your work if you stand on the stairs and shoot down on the scene (with a wide angle lens of course).

I have to admit just looking at all the baby paraphernalia took me back to my own first year as a new parent. It’s really incredible how one tiny baby (who isn’t yet holding up her head) can take over an entire living space!

So what do you do when you have to provide home staging advice to a new parent?

Here are some home staging tips to keep in mind:

Your client is overwhelmed as a new parent and the prospect of selling their home and moving is probably enough to put them “over the edge.”

There are severe limits on how many changes you can request of them. After all, a quiet and happy baby comes first (in their minds), not a perfectly staged home.

They hired a home stager because they recognize they need help, so don’t be afraid to provide it.

Keep your advice to the point. There is limited quiet time, energy and focus to devote to you, so don’t beat around the bush.

Be direct, but deliver your staging recommendations with kindness.

Organize/do whatever you can for your clients in this first visit, so they aren’t left with an overwhelming “to do” list after your home staging consultation. If you’ve taken the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, you know that a home staging consultation should usually also be a working session and how that affects your income and how much staging you will do.

Help your client figure out which baby items can be put away until after the house sells and which ones are immediate must-have’s. In this one room I spotted a bouncy seat, playpen, swing and car seat! Not all 4 are necessary every single day. By the way, where did our own mothers put us down before all these contraptions were invented?

Few parents have the time/energy to run upstairs every time the baby needs changing. Work out a method to keep what they need hidden away on every level of the home. For example, a decorative and covered basket can hold baby wipes, clean diapers, etc. so they are always handy but aren’t spread all over the coffee table.

Eliminate unnecessary furniture when you can’t eliminate baby stuff. For example, in this room I recommended putting the tall wine rack with glasses in storage and pushing the playpen over if that was a “must keep” item. The tall shelf looks terrible where it is, regardless of the baby situation. It competes with the fireplace and looks awkward from all angles.

Home stagers, what other advice would you provide for those of us doing home staging consultations for new parents? Please share your comments below.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Debra bought, staged and sold 6 homes as a single parent, while her child was aged 14 months to 12 years.

In my last post I introduced you to home stager Kimberly (not her real name), who had amassed enough home staging furniture and accessories to fill at least ten 2-bedroom condos. She is a wonderfully talented decorator and home stager. Her work looks like it could be in a decorating magazine.

In part 2 of this cautionary tale for home stagers thinking of investing in their own home staging inventory, I’ll share some of the classic mistakes Kimberly made so that you won’t make the same ones. And for those of you who know you’ll never allow yourself to get into this situation, you can read on and feel smug about your own business savvy!

Unfortunately, Kimberly didn’t approach her home staging business with a business focus. Instead, she was obsessed with how lovely she wanted to make all her clients’ condos look.

“Creating beauty” was her driving force, rather than making money.

There’s nothing wrong with allowing your desire to decorate beautiful spaces be what keeps you inspired, but unless this is a hobby, it’s also critical to remember that you’re also creating a home staging business that’s supposed to make money!

Kimberly did amazing work. I saw the photos, and honestly they all looked like they were magazine shoots out of decorating magazines. She really did everything up to the nine’s from beautiful furniture and window treatments in every room, to dishes on the breakfast bar. Her home staging projects looked lovely, and she can be very proud of the creativity she brought to it. But her creative talent was not only a strength, it became her biggest weakness.

In her desire to be a home stager and decorator, Kimberly forgot that she was also a businessperson. She needed to make money in her home staging business, not just feed her own creative desires.

She also didn’t understand that the way she structured her staging business meant that she was really in the furniture rental business. Since she didn’t realize that, she also didn’t realize how quickly she was headed for bankruptcy.

The date she had to pay off her debt was fast approaching and she had no cash flow because her inventory was all tied up in open-ended contracts.

Kimberly made the classic mistake of setting it up so that people could have her home staging furniture and accessories for up to a year for a fixed amount. This meant there was no ongoing revenue stream if the items remained with the same client month after month after month.

Unfortunately, she assumed that if her home staging customers only needed the items for a few months, it would be like being paid for the whole year. Which it wasn’t because she was charging too low a percentage of the retail price (her first mistake). She assumed that she’d be able to re-rent the items 3 or 4 times in a single year and that by the time the debt was due she would have made enough in home staging rental fees to pay for it (her second mistake).

Making her contracts so open-ended that way, and not ensuring that she had a steady cash flow coming in, she had nothing to protect her when the real estate market slowed down. Her clients’ luxury condos were not selling, and she had all her home staging furniture and accessories tied up for at least a year with no other income coming in (her biggest mistake). By the way, I should mention at this point that she had a lawyer help her with the contracts! Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have brought a business mind to the task either!

Rather than realizing what was happening, perhaps because she was so driven by her desire to decorate, Kimberly kept repeating the same mistakes.

She’d get a new project, she’d go out and get the furniture and do it again and again. In fact, I distinctly remember her describing a new project where she had inventory from an already sold client project to use. She had it all moved in for the new home staging client and spent a day moving it all around. Then she decided this furniture wasn’t exactly “right” for this particular project and went out and bought new inventory to suit the new project.

Naturally, her expense of moving all her original inventory in and moving it back to storage again, plus the new expense of buying an entire condo’s worth of new furniture  was hers to bear. All she did was bill her originally agreed upon fee. When she described this to me, I knew I was talking to a decorating addict or perhaps a shop-a-holic!

Very scary. When I listened to her I kept thinking, “Is there no one in her life that saw the road she was heading down, least of all her husband?” It was amazing. I couldn’t believe how she got herself into that situation.

I wanted to share Kimberly’s story with you, because if you are going to get into the furniture rental business, then you need to approach that carefully with a lot of business analysis and your eyes wide open to the potential pitfalls.

Not only are you investing in furniture, you’ve got to pay for storage and insurance. Then you have to think about how the furniture is getting from wherever your storage is to the client’s home. So that means you now have to start hiring a truck and movers, etc. It’s a complex way to do things that involves lots of overhead.

In Course 2, The Business of Home Staging: What You Need to Start and How to Grow, and Course 3, Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations, I teach home stagers how to work with their own inventory in more detail. But I also teach you how to work without it (and make lots of money along the way), so you don’t have to get into all these risks.

I’ve run my own home staging business since 2002 and staged many vacant homes as well as ones that people are living in. I have not invested in my own inventory, and I have made a lot of money doing it that way as have many of my students.

Kimberly never took the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program but hired me to help her with one-on-one business coaching after she found herself $100,000 in debt!  I wish she had spoken to me two years earlier because I could have saved her so much grief (and money). I helped her restructure her pricing strategy and develop new terms for future furniture rentals. We also developed a strategy for her to maximize the value of her current inventory and turn some of it into cash to pay down her debts.

I’ve taught thousands of home stagers and personally coached hundreds of others. Their questions, challenges and triumphs provide a rich ground for the examples and tips I share with you in this blog (though I never use anyone’s real name without their permission).

Please share your feedback to this story and any advice you would have given Kimberly to avoid the situation she found herself in. Do you use your own home staging inventory?

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

If you’re a home stager thinking, “Gee, if I had my own home staging inventory I could make all these homes look so much prettier,” you need to read this cautionary tale.

Kimberly (not her real name) lives in a major US city and was staging high-end condos, using all her own home staging furniture and accessories. She does not have a “package” from a previous career, an inheritance, or a wealthy husband. But, she has a vision for how wonderful all her clients’ homes could look when decorated properly.

To put her creative vision into action, Kimberly bought everything she needed at stores whenever they were running those “don’t-pay-a-cent” events where you can get what you need on credit, and you don’t have to pay for it for another 2 years.

That’s how Kimberly amassed all this home staging inventory— project by project. Every time she had a new condo to stage, she would buy all the furniture and accessories for that particular condo. Then another project would come, and she’d go out and do it again.

Kimberly believed that since she didn’t have to pay for her home staging inventory for a couple of years, she could make a small fortune in the meantime.

She assumed she was going to rent her furniture several times over the two years.By the time the payment due dates arrived, she imagined she would have made all this profit from renting and re-renting the items out to her clients. At least that was the “logic” of it in Kimberly’s mind.

She never took the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program but hired me to help her with one-on-one business coaching after she found herself $100,000 in debt!

Catch the rest of Kimberly’s story on Thursday. In the meantime, if you’re already a home stager please share your experiences with buying and renting out your own home staging inventory by commenting below!

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

Running your own business is not all tea and roses. It takes work whether you’re a home stager or any other type of entrepreneur.

It doesn’t help that the economy has been in such horrible shape over the past few years. But, we’re all living in this economy no matter how we choose to earn a living.

It’s important to remind yourself why you became a home stager in the first place and consider what else you could be doing to earn money instead.

• Would that other thing bring you more personal satisfaction, meet your various needs AND make you more money?
• Would you be happier doing something else or running a home staging business?

Here’s why I decided to become a home stager in 2002 (in a hot real estate market where most people said, “Why would I need a home stager, my house can sell if I just put a sign on the lawn?”):

• Knew I loved decorating because I’d been doing it as a hobby since I was a kid.
• Loved the buzz of real estate, having bought and sold 7 of my own homes, but I didn’t want to be a real estate agent on-call 24/7).
• Knew from buying houses in 4 different cities that most people don’t have a clue about how to show their homes well.
• Knew from experience that people will bid against each other to buy a home they’ve fallen in love with.
• Made solid money flipping homes because of the cosmetic changes I made to them. This proved to me that I had staging talent.
• Knew that even in a hot real estate market lots of houses don’t sell as fast as they should or for as much money as they could.
• Knew the real estate market would eventually slow down and people would need even more help decorating their homes to sell.
• Realized that home staging was a marriage of two “sexy” topics that more and more people were talking about, “decorating,” and “making money in real estate.” I could see that the field would grow (at the time I started there were no TV shows on staging, but HGTV was already huge and decorating shows had hit the mainstream).
• Wanted to earn money from my creative talents and needed to make a lot of it because I was the sold provider for my family.
• Didn’t want to work for anyone else (when I was an employee I had to put up with sexual harassment, and bosses with anger management and addiction issues)
• Needed to have control over my time because I was a single parent of a 7-year old.
• Knew that having a staging talent that could help home sellers and real estate agents make money would be something I could make money from and get paid very well for.
• Needed a low-cost business to start because I was in debt when I started.

The first year was especially tough and as my Staging Diva Students know, I wanted to give up many times. Mostly because I wasn’t making enough money. I hadn’t figured out the right pricing and marketing strategies to grow as fast as I needed to. I’m glad I didn’t give up because once I figured out my formula, I was making up to $10,000 a month staging homes. I had also been featured on HGTV, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and many decorating magazines.

This was something I never would have predicted and if I’d know that was around the corner, I wouldn’t have felt so much like giving up!

This week I read the eulogy that Steve Jobs sister delivered. I have been a huge fan of Apple since I bought my first computer in 1989 to start my first solo business. I know that I could not have had all the success I’ve had over these years as an entrepreneur without my various Macintosh computers. When Steve Jobs died I was sad for many reasons and I also couldn’t help but think of what amazing gifts he would have brought to the world had he not died at such a young age (only 4 years older than I am now).

One of the lines I found very poignant from his sister’s eulogy was that “we all die in the middle of our stories.”

What story are you in the middle of? Is it the right one? Do you feel that you’re living some else’s story/life or your own? What should you change right now, since you don’t know how long you have to finish this story or start the next?

Please share your thoughts below. I know it’s hard to stay motivated when you feel like you’re struggling. I know it’s hard to always find our courage. I battle with these demons myself. We need to keep each other motivated to do our best work and live our best life.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is President of Six Elements Inc. and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. An entrepreneur for almost 25 years and author of several guides, Debra has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and uses her expertise to train others worldwide.

Recently I posed a home staging business question, Home Stagers When Do You Cut Your Rates? I described various scenarios and what potential clients may say to put pressure on you and asked for feedback from my fellow home stagers.

Now it’s time for my thoughts on this subject, plus I’ll share a terrific example of how home stager Amy handled this common home staging business dilemma.

From the time I started my home staging business, Six Elements in 2002, I’ve always been one of the most expensive home stagers in my city— or at least I was beginning in 2003 when I really figured out the right pricing strategy and my profits went up almost 500%!

Rather than competing on price, I marketed myself as THE expert home stager in my area. I wanted people to come to me when they were looking for the best.

My clients knew they were going to have to pay more for my services, and it was a much more effective marketing strategy than promoting myself as the cheapest stager out there.

Not only do I recommend against competing on price, I also recommend against discounting your rates, as Graduates of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program will attest. The following story, which was sent to me by a home stager named Amy, is a shining example of why I hold this philosophy:

“Prove your worth or cheapen your value? That’s the scenario I faced after a lengthy game I found myself playing with a local real estate agent and his client.

The agent had called me on St. Patrick’s Day to provide him with an estimate for staging a vacant property for one of his clients. The next business day, I put together a bid for the agent with my price and the furniture rental estimates.

After a week with no word back from the agent, I called him and he told me he’d check with his client to see whether a decision had been made. This went on for three weeks, which is not something I’m used to. Generally a prospective client will get back to me within a few days with a yes or no answer. In this case, though, the homeowner kept going through his agent trying to get me to negotiate my rate, which I refused to do.

Just before Easter, the agent gave me the homeowner’s number so I could follow up myself, which I did—once a week—until the seller asked to meet me in person. He told me he had eight homes he would like to stage, and he tried once more to get me to lower my rate.

I had an important decision to make that day.

My choices were to sell him on my value as a credible home stager or to discount my rate and cheapen my value. After all, how could I be sure there were eight properties involved?

After reviewing my estimate, I confidently showed the homeowner my licensing, insurance, portfolio and other credentials.

I walked out of there with my 50% deposit check and a date to stage the home.

I was also given the address of the next home I was to stage—his $2 million country club residence. In addition, I was shown the mortgages for 25 properties he wanted to flip within the next month.

I hung onto my dignity and snagged a reliable and steady staging income. Playing a little hardball kept me in the game. Staging homes is a joy, but it is also my career. This experience taught me to never forget that the profit margin of a well-staged home will exceed my fees every time. I should never compromise my own fair value pricing, but instead, focus on selling my worth as a professional home stager.”

Amy, kudos for holding your ground during negotiations! It definitely paid off.

Home stagers, have you been in a similar situation? How did you handle it? Please share your experiences below.

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

Debra Gould has been using her creative talents to stage homes since 2002. She knows how to make money as a home stager and shares her formula for staging business success in the Staging Diva home staging courses.

Home stagers are often asked to do free home staging consultations which masquerade as free estimates until you get to the home and are bombarded with very specific questions like:

• Should I replace the vinyl floor in the kitchen?
• What do you think of my front porch?
• Home buyers aren’t going to care about (insert any one of a thousand problems), right?

Staging Diva students learn how to avoid falling into what I call this “free estimate trap” in Course 3, Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations.

Here’s a related (and all too common) staging business dilemma. What about the potential client who says:

• “I’m a real estate investor and after this property there will be 5 more for you to stage. How much can you cut the price of your current estimate?”

• “I really wasn’t planning on spending that much, if you give me a deal I’ll recommend you to all my friends. How does that sound?”

• “I get lots of real estate listings so I can really throw a lot of business your way. But I was hoping to spend much less per listing for your advice. What can you do for me?”

Home stagers, what do you do when faced with the business dilemma of being asked to cut your rates? What do you say to the potential client?  Please weigh in on this topic and add your comments below.  I’ll write a follow up post about how home stager Amy tackled this problem and what it did for her business.

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 money making home staging businesses. There are now 4,000 students in over 20 countries around the world following her formula for business success.

Graduates of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program know that while I teach the pros and cons of having your own home staging inventory, I’m a big fan of not having it. It’s really not necessary to invest tens of thousands of dollars in home staging furniture, art and accessories and I say this as someone who has staged hundreds of homes, many of them vacant or only partially furnished. There are tons of pitfalls of furniture rentals for home stagers.

Early in my home staging career I was invited by an “established” home stager to tour through a condo she had staged. She was selling her furniture rental inventory and assured me I could get a real steal by buying all the contents from her.

She was quick to point out that she’d made $5,000 staging that property so my investment would pay back quickly. What she didn’t know was that I had already staged a number of vacant properties using inventory from an actual rental company and made just as much profit as she did, without having any of her overhead. Needless to say I didn’t buy what she was selling and appreciated that early view of how much better my business model was than hers. After all, she was selling her inventory! If she was making so much money from it, she wouldn’t be doing that!

I’ve been a home stager since 2002 and have communicated with thousands of home stagers over the years in more than 20 different countries. A certain pattern has been obvious to me throughout that time.  The home stagers most likely to go out of business within their first or second year are the ones who maintain their own inventory. Their sizable upfront investment, plus the ongoing cost (and hassles) of storage, pick up, delivery, cleaning, maintenance and insurance usually have a lot to do with this.

Many new home stagers believe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Their situation is “special” they tell me, “it’s different where I live.” Hey, if you really want to get into the furniture rental business, go for it! But before you do, I’d like to share some actual comments word-for-word that home stagers have shared in emails with me, on Facebook, etc. I’ll leave their names out since they might not want this to be public:

“Had another Glamorous Day in the life of a Home Stager: Inventory maintenance in +100 heat followed by a refreshing round of washing and drying one of my tubs of bath towels.”

“I have selected each and every one of our pieces of inventory, and including cushions, towels, bedding, artwork, accessories and hard furniture we own around 7,500 pieces of stock. While that seems a lot, when you cover off pillows, cushions (oh the cushions!!) and then designer accessories, the list grows quickly.”

“I am so upset! I am out of the country and I just heard the house that I staged was broken into. They took a lot of my inventory and the owner said he has nothing to do with it: it is my problem!”

“Anyone have storage suggestions for lampshades? I’m tight on space, so putting a couple into a plastic tub is not very efficient. They’re currently in boxes which is not very protective either.”

“I already own enough stock to furnish 12 large condos but since the market slowed down all that inventory is tied up indefinitely. Now whenever I get a new client, I have to go out and buy more stuff. I bought everything on credit but a year from now I’m going to have to come up with close to $100,000 to pay off the debt.”

“A REALTOR just called to see if I was interested in purchasing the inventory she just purchased from another Home Stager who’s leaving town. Anyone else interested?”

“Vacant House was Staged. Stager put up rods and drapes. In buyer’s Contract, they asked for window treatments. Sellers knew they were not theirs, so it was crossed out and agreed to by buyers. At Closing, the Buyers wanted the rods, as they were affixed to the home and not disclosed as being Stager’s inventory.”

“Yes, that’s me double parking a U-Haul filled with my home staging inventory because there’s nowhere else to park that’s anywhere close to the house I’m staging.”

So if you don’t want to take my word for it, based on my years of experience and all the home stagers I’ve taught or coached, I hope these comments have let you glimpse the realities of owning your own home staging inventory.

Consider also the potential hassles and liability of bringing bed bugs from one property to another (or potentially your own). You can read my free report on how home stagers can protect themselves from bed bugs here.

I’d love it if my readers would add their own experiences with the pros and cons of having your own inventory. Please add your comments below!

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. In Course 3, Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations, you’ll learn how to make money staging furnished homes without having to use any of your own home staging inventory.