After staging tens of millions of dollars worth of real estate and teaching over 800 others around the world how to start a home staging business, I have created the following list of skills and talents I feel a professional home stager should have.

I developed this list by observing my students who were the most successful in building their own real estate staging business.

1. A talent for decorating and working with color.

You should be a creative individual, have a sense of space and be visual. I am not saying you need to be a trained Interior Designer or trained Decorator to be a Home Stager.

If you have a talent for it, it comes naturally. No amount of training can substitute for raw talent.

2. An interest in real estate.

You have to love looking at homes. One of the homework assignments I give in the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program is to go and visit open houses and pretend the home belongs to your client. To test your powers of observation and ability to see how things can be improved, walk through the house and think about what changes you would recommend in each room. It’s an excellent way to see if you have an innate sense for home staging.

3. Organizational Skills.

You need to be very organized and be able to pay attention to detail because it is the details in the house that make a difference in a home staging project. Often times clients are emotionally attached to the house and all its possessions, and they cannot look at it with the same objective eye that a professional can.

When visiting clients’ homes, you are going to walk into some of the most chaotic environments. You will be surprised at how many people live— no matter whether they are rich or poor, or the price of their house.

You have to be somebody who innately likes to create order out of chaos.

4. Work well under pressure.

You must be able to work under very tight time lines. Few people call me 6 months before they are going to sell the house. Most call me one to two weeks before they are listing their home, or when it is already on the market. That doesn’t leave much time to complete the transformation.

5. Work well with others.

You need to be comfortable dealing with different types of people and with people who are often under stress, because selling a home can be very stressful. Many times, I deal with couples who are divorcing or somebody has died or somebody is getting transferred.

Part of what makes a good Home Stager is being able to walk in to any situation and calm the person down. You are bringing proven experience to the table to help the homeowners expedite the selling process. It is a valuable service to be able to help someone through this stressful situation and break it down for them into manageable chunks.

This skill also comes into play when you are coordinating the activities of painters, handymen, furniture rental companies and cleaners as I had to do for the house pictured above. This family room in the basement was completely transformed, along with the rest of the house, over a two week period.

The danger of undervaluing your natural talent

Often times, individuals take for granted the things that they just naturally do well and assume that everyone else knows how to do those things too. But they don’t, as evidenced by the millions of really ugly homes for sale all over the world.

Building a business around your innate skills dramatically increases your chances of success. If you feel like you have some or all of the above-mentioned skills, use your natural talents to seize the opportunity to make a living and a life doing what you love.

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

Entrepreneur and Home Staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva, knows how to make money as a home stager. Discover her secrets to business success in the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program.

Free quiz to see if a home staging business is right for you

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Professional Home Stagers have the ability to imagine what even the worst room can look like with the right color, furniture, lighting and accessories. That’s not easy to do if you don’t have the right eye for it. For home sellers, it’s especially difficult to view their home as a highly critical buyer will. They are too emotionally involved in the house, the contents, the memories of living there, why they need to move, etc. Home Stager Debra Rowley of Debra Rowley Interior Staging saw this living room when it was filled with construction debris. She was able to create the right contemporary look to attract a full price offer at the first open house for this $945,000 Seattle area home!

Home staging is all about romancing the home buyer, which is especially necessary in slow real estate markets.

Prospective buyers shop with logic but they buy on emotion.

Unless they walk into a home and make an emotional connection with it, they won’t make an offer. Especially in a buyer’s market when they feel no pressure to act quickly because there are so many other homes to choose from.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 750+ Graduates worldwide. She is the author of “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Colors for Home Staging Projects”, and “Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services”.

Debra also offers a Directory of Home Stagers to help homeowners and real estate agents locate home stagers who will decorate homes to sell quickly and for top dollar.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, real estate staging, Seattle home staging, home staging statistics, romancing home buyers, decorate to sell, Debra Rowley, Washington home staging, Sammamish real estate, Staging Diva

Home stagers often have trouble sourcing attractive art to rent to their clients when they’re decorating their homes to sell.

Once you take down the photos, diplomas, hunting trophies and religious items that have no place in a home when it’s on the real estate market, there’s often little left to work with.

Finding appropriate art that will enhance the home without taking over and getting it in the size and framing needed has been challenging until now. I created the Staging Diva Home Staging Art Shop to make this easier and I’ve created specific art galleries for every key room in the house. So you don’t have to wonder if a particular work of art is more appropriate for a master bedroom or dining room for example.

My goal was to take the mystery out of using art for home staging and make it easy for home stagers to earn passive income renting and re-renting pieces from their art collection out to home sellers or their real estate agents.

The Staging Diva Art Shop allows you to order online, preview how the work of art will look in a particular frame and matting, see it against different wall colors and more. There’s also an option to print the work in a variety of sizes on canvas to have a gallery wrap rather than a frame.

Visit the Staging Diva Home Staging Art Shop and don’t forget to sign up for your free copy of The Staging Diva’s Top Ten Tips for Using Art In Home Staging!

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

Debra Gould, creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Training Program, has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. Debra is the President of Six Elements which offers Home Staging, Interior Redesign and Color Consulting services, as well as the StagingDiva.com website.

Gould has gained international recognition and has been featured in major media in the US and Canada including: HGTV, CNN Money, CBC National News, CBS Radio, GlobalTV, CityTV, The Wall Street Journal, Womanís Day, Reader’s Digest and more.

Technorati Tags: home staging, house staging, home stager, real estate staging, real estate enhancement, art for home staging, renting art, art for home stagers, art for staging, home staging art gallery, decorate to sell, home staging art shop, sell homes fast, house fluffing, Staging Diva, Debra Gould

Simplicity is the essence of great real estate staging. When it is over contrived it fails miserably in it’s mission of romancing the prospective home buyer.

Must we continue to see tea trays carefully perched at a forty five degree angle at the end of a bed? Or towels in a bathroom with a star fish or other shell placed on top? Is that to evoke a relaxed mood?

I saw a staging segment on TV awhile back. The staging team actually hung tassels around hand towels and emptied lentils onto charger plates on the dining room table as a decorative touch.

Are prospective home buyers to think the family lives this way? Are they to immediately imagine themselves living that way in such a dream home and want it for themselves too?

“Oh honey, don’t forget to put that shell back after you dry off from the shower!”

Why not just run a special headline across the agent’s feature sheet that says, “Notice the special details to delight and surprise you in every room, because this home has been decorated to make you pay as much as possible for it.”

Homeowners, home buyers, agents, fellow stagers: reply back with comments on your pet peeves and the Stupid Staging Tricks you’ve seen. I’d like to assemble a list of bad staging ideas to share with those who would like to effectively decorate homes to sell quickly and for top dollar— without insulting home buyers intelligence!

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 700+ Graduates worldwide. She is the author of “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Colors for Home Staging Projects”, and “Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services”.

Technorati Tags: home stager, home staging, real estate staging, stupid staging tricks, staging tricks, home staging business, home staging consultation, how to stage, Staging Diva, Debra Gould

Many home stagers worry that they’ll forget some of the details they need to cover with a homeowner or real estate agent during a home staging consultation. Or they aren’t sure how to best organize the meeting, what to bring and how to best present their ideas in a way that won’t offend their clients.

After all, we’re going into someone’s home with the express purpose of changing it before they list the house for sale. That can raise some sensitive issues that need to be handled diplomatically.

I created the “Staging Diva Home Staging Consultation Checklist With Room-by-Room Client Planning Forms” to give stagers a tool to make home staging consultations easier, less stressful and more profitable.

This tool is really two products in one.

The first part guides you through how I do a home staging consultation based on the hundreds of homes I’ve staged over the last five years. I take you through:

• what you should consider before the meeting
• what you should bring with you
• how to start the consultation
• the process I use as I go through a client’s home
• how to end the meeting

In the second part of this new tool, the Room-by-Room Client Planning Forms, I give you exactly that. I’ve set it up so all you have to do is put your own logo and contact information on the cover of the planning forms section and then photocopy the rest.

I’ve given you forms/checklists to fill out for every room in the house! There are different pages for the:

• living room
• dining room
• kitchen
• master bedroom
• 3 additional bedrooms
• powder room
• 3 bathrooms
• play room
• home office
• family room
• den
• basement
• attic
• garage
• front porch
• exterior
• overall home
• suggestions for showings

You can fill these Room-by-Room Client Planning Forms out yourself or let your client do it as you go room by room during your home staging consultation. Another way to use the forms is to just have your own copy that you refer to as you go along helping you stay organized and making sure you don’t miss anything you should be discussing in a particular room.

If you or your client fills out the forms as you go through the home, you’ll have a professional looking and complete document to leave with the homeowner at the end of your meeting. This puts an end to the time wasting and unprofitable task of typing up a report of your recommendations after the fact. Besides, anyone with a non-selling home already on the market, or anyone about to list with lots to do to get ready, doesn’t want to wait the day or two it would take to get your report. They want immediate solutions and this tool allows you to meet this need.

And no more worrying that you’ll forget some of the details as you go through a house. It’s all laid out for you step-by-step, all you have to do is fill in the blanks!

Learn more about Staging Diva Home Staging Consultation Checklist With Room-by-Room Client Planning Forms.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 700+ Graduates worldwide. She is the author of “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Colors for Home Staging Projects”, and “Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services”.

Debra also offers a Directory of Home Stagers to help homeowners and real estate agents locate home stagers who will decorate homes to sell quickly and for top dollar.

Technorati Tags: Debra Gould, home stager, home staging, home staging business, home staging consultation, home staging guide, how to stage, real estate staging, staging checklist, Staging Diva

Learn more about home staging as George Bodarky interviews Staging Diva Graduate Donna Dazzo of Designed to Appeal on New York City’s public radio station WFUV-FM 90.7

Time: Saturday, February 16, 7:30 AM.

Donna’s first project after completing the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program was to transform a vacant $3.5 million home in the Hamptons.

This huge home had been on the market for over a year. Imagine the carrying costs for the owner!

Within a week Donna turned the house into a show home by bringing in furniture and accessories.

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

Entrepreneur and Home Staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva, knows how to make money as a home stager. Discover her secrets to business success in the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program.

Free quiz to see if a home staging business is right for you.

It’s important to spread the word about home staging to home owners, home sellers and real estate agents, especially in a softening real estate market like the United States.

To that end, I’ve started writing for American Chronicle. Check out some of my latest articles:

Selling Your Home? 7 Tips to Hiring a Professional Home Stager

Desperate Home Sellers Turn to Home Staging For a Competitive Edge

Home Staging Helps Real Estate Investors and Builders Maximize Profits

By the way, for anyone listed in the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers, these efforts will help drive more traffic to your profiles.

Learn more about how to join the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 700+ Graduates worldwide. She is the author of “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Colors for Home Staging Projects”, and “Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services”.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, real estate staging, home staging business, house fluffing, real estate enhancement, American Chronicle, Staging Diva, Debra Gould

I’m often asked by home stagers what pages they should include on their websites. My 10 “must have” web pages include:

1. Home Page

Here’s where you’ll talk about what home staging is and what markets you serve. Don’t forget to include your state or province. Remember website visitors come from all over the world and many city names are common between different states or provinces.

You must write your own copy for this page or hire someone to do it for you. It’s plagiarism and copyright infringement to copy web content from someone else’s website and put it onto your own, unless you do so with their permission and you quote them. Taking what they have and changing an occasional word is still copyright infringement!

2. Portfolio

Here’s where you’ll include portfolio-worthy before and after photos of homes you have staged or decorated. DO NOT USE STOCK PHOTOS as this practice misleads potential customers and will destroy your credibility if you get caught passing off someone else’s work as your own.

If you haven’t had a paying client yet, shoot photos in your home or that of a friend if you’ve decorated it. The key here is that if you’re selling your decorating or staging talent, the photos must represent your own work.

3. About Us

Here’s where you’ll include a photo of you and a profile of why you’re great at what you do, any experience you want to share, testimonials from a few clients.

Don’t include a photo of you holding your child, it’s not relevant to the task of promoting yourself as a professional home stager and will in fact work against you.

The photo of you is important because people hire people and they want to see who you are before phoning or emailing you. Remember that how well your website encourages people to contact you is highly dependent on how well you write about who you are and what you do.

If the copy isn’t compelling, prospects won’t bother to call or email you.

4. Contact Us

Don’t forget to make it easy for people to contact you. Include a phone number and email address (though to decrease spam you might want to include a contact us form that users complete rather than publishing your actual email address).

It’s important to have a mailing address as well, but don’t put your home address on a website. Use a PO box or mail forwarding service instead.

5. Testimonials

It’s a great idea to sprinkle testimonials around your website, but you should also have a page devoted exclusively to them.

Testimonials have much greater weight and credibility if they include full names at a minimum. Also nice are photos, city and company names (if applicable).

6. Services

Here’s where you’ll describe what you do and how. Some stagers like to include their rates on this page, though I advise against this practice for a number of reasons I share with my students.

You must write your own text or hire someone to write it for you. It’s plagiarism to copy web content from someone else’s website and put it onto your own.

7. Media

Here’s where you’ll include any mentions of you in newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. You can also include links to any website you are on. If you haven’t been featured in any media yet, you can include links to stories about home staging to help educate your audience. But don’t try and pretend you’re in the story if you aren’t.

It makes me crazy when I see all these stagers slapping an “As seen on HGTV” logo on their pages even though they’ve never been on HGTV. What they mean is that “home staging” has been on HGTV but they don’t say that and deliberately mislead people. This will back fire.

8. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Because home staging is a new concept to many people, it’s not a bad idea to include a FAQ page. Think about what your prospective clients and real estate agents would want to know about home staging in general and you in particular.

9. Confirmation or Thank You

If you’re asking people to sign up for something, complete a form or order something, after they do so they should “land” on a confirmation or thank you page so that they know the action they took went through.

10. Privacy Policy

If you’ll be collecting ANY information from prospective customers, you need to include information on how that information will be used, shared and protected.

Now, these 10 pages are just a beginning, you’ll add others as you have more material. Remember a website is a bit like having a hungry dragon living in the basement. Now that he’s there, you have to keep feeding him. It’s important to constantly update your site with fresh content so that visitors will keep coming back and so that the search engines will rank your site.

To learn more about how to get great home staging photos, write a compelling profile and how to get the right kind of testimonials, check out the Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 700+ Graduates worldwide. She is the author of “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Colors for Home Staging Projects”, and “Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services”.

Debra also offers a Directory of Home Stagers to help homeowners and real estate agents locate home stagers who will decorate homes to sell quickly and for top dollar.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, real estate staging, home staging business, house fluffing, real estate enhancement, Staging Diva, Debra Gould

I’ve been hearing from a lot of aspiring and seasoned home stagers worrying that the slow real estate market makes it impossible to build a home staging business. Nothing could be further from the truth.In a slow real estate market, also called a “buyer’s market,” prospective home buyers can afford to take their time deciding whether to purchase a particular house. There’s little, to none, of that sense of urgency where buyer’s feel that if they don’t act immediately the house may be snapped up by others that very day.

It’s hard not to feel smug as a home buyer when you see the listing has been sitting on the market for 90 or 120 days. There’s a rush of power that comes with feeling you’re in the driver’s seat when you’re considering making an offer. And, it’s hard not to feel desperate as a home seller when you spend day after day with your life on hold and your agent urging you to take yet another price reduction.

Price reductions cost home owners big money, but they don’t change the real estate agent’s take home commission by all that much. So, why wouldn’t they recommend one? After all, if you price something low enough, someone will buy it! (Agents may want to read more about why it’s in their interest to recommend home staging to their clients.)

That’s where home stagers come in.

We offer homeowners a financially attractive alternative to endless price reductions.

This doesn’t mean we can dress up an overpriced home to sell immediately in a down market. But, if a home is priced right, and it looks better than all the comparable homes for sale, why wouldn’t it sell faster, or for more, than the others? It’s only common sense.

We offer a way to attract Internet-savvy homebuyers.

With approximately 70% of home buyers looking on the Internet for their next home, the photos have to be stellar. And, let’s face it, the unstaged home just isn’t photo-perfect. Most are downright ugly at worst, and at best, they have nothing to make them stand out from the hundreds of other alternatives in that price range.

Home buyers shop with logic and buy on emotion.

Home stagers (if they’re good) create an environment that prospective buyers will fall in love with. Remember those smug, I-can-afford-to-take-my-time home buyers I mentioned earlier? They won’t be so smug when they’re in love and worried that their DREAM HOME might disappear to another buyer.

I was interviewed by Les Christie, CNNMoney on why home staging is an essential strategy in selling a home in a slow real estate market, you can read it here.

Read more about why home staging works.

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

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 700+ Graduates worldwide. She is the author of “Staging Diva Ultimate Color Guide: The Easy Way to Pick Colors for Home Staging Projects”, and “Staging Diva Ultimate Guide: Creating The Perfect Portfolio to Sell Your Home Staging Services”.

Debra also offers a Directory of Home Stagers to help homeowners and real estate agents locate home stagers who will decorate homes to sell quickly and for top dollar.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, real estate staging, slow real estate, home staging business, house fluffing, real estate enhancement, Staging Diva, Debra Gould

Many people ask me where I see the future of home staging, or whether I think it’s a fad that will die out and people will stop decorating their homes to sell quickly and for top dollar.

We’ll eventually get to the point where staging a house is something that you just do when it’s time to sell

Look what happened to “home inspections.” Most people today wouldn’t buy a home without having it inspected first in order to make sure that the roof doesn’t leak, the foundation is solid, the furnace works, etc. There was a time when nobody did home inspections, and now it’s an accepted practice. That’s where I see home staging going.

In fact, I’m already seeing that in certain neighborhoods in Toronto. That certainly wasn’t the case five years ago, but there are neighborhoods like Leaside, Riverdale and the Beach, where a good percentage of sellers always stage their homes when they put them on the market. It’s something they know that they have to do to stand out from the competition. It’s part of the process of selling a home. That will eventually be the case in most locations, especially major cities.

The future for home staging is very strong

It’s not like the world is suddenly going to say, “Let’s just go back to buying really ugly houses.” That’s not going to happen. Greater numbers of people are becoming increasingly savvy about what a difference design can make, yet they don’t have the time or talent to do it themselves.

You only have to look at prime time television to see that. There was a time when HGTV didn’t exist, but even when it first started, it was a real fringe thing. Only certain kinds of people watched decorating shows, and now everybody watches!

Oprah is always talking about decorating and design. There are home makeover shows on prime time networks and there are thousands of decorating (or “shelter”) magazines, so more and more people are becoming aware of the difference it makes when things look good and they aspire to live the lifestyle they see portrayed.

Besides, as more home sellers hire real estate stagers, others will realize they have to follow the practice otherwise their un-staged homes will look even worse by comparison.

Home Staging Marries the Sexy Topics of Decorating and Making Money in Real Estate

As people continue to look for ways to make money in real estate, home staging becomes part of the equation, so that’s never going away. Home staging marries the two sexy topics of decorating and making money in real estate, and people are always going to be interested in those two topics. I don’t see home staging being something that’s a flash in the pan and then suddenly disappearing. I see it continuing to grow.

Home Staging Growth Will Follow a Bell Curve Like Most Services or Products

Product introductions and markets follow what’s called a “bell curve.” The bell curve is like the outline of an upside down bell or a soup bowl that’s turned upside-down. In home staging today, we’re still going up the left side of the bowl. We’re at the introduction phase of home staging, but we’re starting to climb.

When you reach the top of the bowl or bell, and it flattens out, that’s when a market is mature, and it stays that way for a long time before it eventually begins to decline. But as I said, I don’t think home staging is going to decline, because people are always drawn to things that look better. It’s human nature.

There are studies that say people make up their minds about a house within minutes of walking through the front door.

In fact, some people spend less time deciding which house to buy than deciding which big screen TV to buy. It’s crazy. It’s because we respond to a home on an emotional basis. We shop with logic but we buy on emotion. When you walk through a house, you decide very quickly whether you love it or you don’t, and that’s always going to be the case.

Home staging creates an environment where more people are likely to fall in love when they walk through the front door, and that’s not going to change. I see that continuing to increase, and as more people begin to understand that, more people will realize that staging is something that they really need to do before they put their houses on the market.

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

Entrepreneur and Home Staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva, knows how to make money as a home stager. Discover her secrets to home staging business success in the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Free quiz to see if a home staging business is right for you!

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