As a home stager, part of your job is to convince your clients why they have to spend money on a house they’re selling, an unattractive notion for many homeowners you’ll encounter.

Your job is to demonstrate how the money they spend on their home now is actually an investment and that the more money they put into the project, the greater their potential profit when the house sells.

When I entered a bidding war on the home I’m currently living in, I had only a few days to get my other house on the market and there was a lot of pressure to have it looking perfect, especially with me being The Staging Diva!

Of course I didn’t have to hire a stager but I did have to hire a handyman, gardener, painter and junk removal service. I also had no choice but to install a new kitchen floor because the 1920s kitchen had never been renovated. I decided to go with cork because it’s easy to install right over vinyl and it would work well with the retro chic look that I’d created while living in the space.

As the costs continued to climb to prepare my house for the real estate market, I found myself saying, “Why in the world would I spend almost $800 on a new floor for a house that I’m just trying to sell?” Naturally, I know better and the stager half of me was able to give that negative voice a little pep talk on why it’s an investment and not an expense.

When I originally purchased that home I’d painted the old laminate counter tops, cabinets and the back splash. I’d even added new hardware and lighting but I fell into that familiar trap of being too busy to replace the floor and I just got good at learning to ignore it.

The reality is that kitchens are key with buyers and I knew the old floor would stand right out and would encourage buyers to focus on the fact that it was really an old kitchen that had simply been tarted up. The look needed to be complete to wow buyers and leave them thinking “nice kitchen” rather than “this needs to be renovated!”

If I wanted to make a good profit on my own home staging services, I had to complete that look and spend the $800 to fix the floor and when it was finished, I knew it would pay off.

I was right! I sold that house after only 9 days on the market and I sold for well above asking. The profit I made more than covered the costs I’d incurred replacing the kitchen floor and getting repairs done. Even better, despite the house competing with others in the price range that had renovated kitchens with granite counters, the buyer told her agent that one of the reasons she bought the house was that she fell in love with the kitchen!

If your clients are struggling with investing in their home as they prepare to sell, remind them that every improvement they make is one less barrier between a potential buyer and their decision to buy.

Home stagers, do you have a story you’d like to share about an investment your clients were resistant to make that ended up paying off? Please share by leaving a comment 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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home stagers, staging diva, staging clients, home staging courses, home staging business, invest in staging, home staging training, debra gould

Six months ago I wrote a post called Virtual Staging or Just Misleading Pictures? in which I said that I considered using software to manipulate listing photos was a waste of money because as soon as perspective home buyers visit the house they’ll be disappointed (which of course doesn’t lead to an offer to purchase). That’s the best case scenario in my opinion.

At worst, they might even be horrified with what they find as happened to Texas real estate agent Greg Nino, who had a pretty angry client after he took him to see a house that looked nothing like the listing photos. His experience, and some of the surrounding issues, are highlighted in an article this week in the Seattle Times called, Virtual Staging is raising concerns: Virtual Staging can make nightmare look like a dream house.

In it, columnist Kenneth R. Harney describes the slippery slope you’re on when you start manipulating room shots. After all, where do you stop in a virtual staging? Do you only put in “virtual” furniture? Or while you’re at it, do you also change laminate counters to granite, virtually paint over ugly wallpaper, add in crown molding where none exists, etc.?

Many people rationalize that as long as all photos disclose that the property doesn’t really look like that, it’s OK. Or they say,”if there’s no budget to stage for real, using digitally altered listing photos is the next best thing.”

I still think having a big disconnect between what a prospective buyer expects after seeing the listing photos, and what they actual experience when they walk into the home, is a problem.

Imagine going to an online dating site, falling in love with someone’s photo and then you meet them in person and they’re 25 years older and 40 pounds heavier than their photo. Do you stick around long enough to get past that? Maybe if you’ve committed to a dinner and you’re too embarrassed to walk out immediately. But if it was only a coffee, my guess is you drink it up, say you’ve got a meeting and bye bye now!

Now before you accuse me of being overly shallow, consider this. If someone lacks that much integrity when they’re representing themselves in their photo, wouldn’t it make you wonder what else you shouldn’t trust about them?

A real estate showing is rather like that “coffee date”. There’s no obligation to stick around for any length of time. You just turn to the agent and say, “Forget it, this isn’t what I was expecting. Let’s move on to the next house on our list.” Or in agent Nino’s case, you have to deal with an outraged client who is blaming you for wasting their time taking them to a disgusting property that looks nothing like the listing photos.

What do you think of virtual staging? Please share your comments.

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

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

Technorati Tags: virtual staging, virtual staging software, home stagers, home staging, home stager, home staging training, home staging courses, home staging business, staging diva

I have a personal trainer who helps me meet my fitness goals. Could I do those exercises myself? Yes. Would I be as likely to get my butt to the gym three days a week with nobody to hold me accountable? Probably not.

Just as my personal trainer has helped me conquer my fitness challenges, as a business coach I help aspiring and established home stagers meet their goals and grow their businesses.

In the past few weeks, with Staging Diva Accelerator Business Coaching, home stagers have used their one-on-one time with me to:

• Beat down limiting assumptions they’ve been making
• Identify ways to reduce income tax by over 30%
• Deliver a reality check on their ideas and expectations
• Name their businesses
• Review concepts for their business logos
• Critique a website and identify ways to improve its ranking with search engines
• Edit their Staging Diva Directory Profile copy
• Identify ways to increase sales by up to 65%
• Get them through an especially challenging staging project
• Improve on their real estate agent presentation
• Unravel an overwhelming To Do list to focus on the highest pay-off activities
• Review home staging portfolios and identify the strongest photos to include

If you find that you’re feeling stuck on a particular challenge or if you’re ready to start using some new ideas to take your business to the next level, you could benefit from an Accelerator Business Coaching session. You don’t have to be a Staging Diva Student  in order to book a business coaching session with me. In fact, I’ve helped plenty of struggling stagers who have never taken any of my courses, with very specific information geared towards their unique challenges and opportunities.

Once you order coaching time, you’ll be given access to my online calendar so that you can book a convenient appointment date and time in 15, 30, 45 and 60-minute increments. You’ll provide your phone number when booking, and I’ll call you at the appointed time for your business coaching session. It’s that simple.

You don’t need to prepare a list of specific questions so don’t let that stop you.

If you give me a quick overview of your situation and what your biggest challenges are, I will be able to take it from there. It could be one of the most important investments you ever make in your home staging business.

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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home stagers, staging diva, home staging courses, home staging business, home staging coaching, home staging training, debra gould

A few weeks ago I posted a home staging business dilemma asking what you would do if you walked into a home staging consultation to find a nightmarish scene with fur-covered furniture from the 70s – the place where knick knacks go to die.

I asked what you would do, knowing that the woman is a widow who you can tell is grieving not only the loss of her husband but also the loss of the home they’d shared.

I want to thank all of you who left a comment on the original post (read the post and the comments here) and after reading through the feedback, I don’t have a lot to add!

As a home stager you must be comfortable dealing with a grieving homeowner – not necessarily someone who has lost a loved one, but someone who is having to give up their home. It really can be a grieving process.

This situation, like many others, requires you to trade your home stager hat for your therapist hat and respect the emotions of the homeowner.

One of the things I recommend in the course, Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations is that you begin with a walk through of the entire home before making specific recommendations in any one room. There are several reasons for doing this, but one of them is that if you keep an eye on the body language of your client, and listen to what they say in each room, you’ll have an idea which rooms are more sensitive than others.

For example, I was doing a home staging consultation for a widow who was moving to a new condo. When we got to a study filled with books, she mentioned this was where her husband had worked and that this was his library. There was no point in my jumping right into editing and telling her we needed to style the shelves. She would not have been responsive and it would have put her on the defensive throughout the whole staging consultation. Instead, I left this room until last. By the time we got to it, I had built up a rapport with her and I could then more gently ease her into the need to pack up her late husband’s books “in preparation for her upcoming move.”

Here are other suggestions you can make for the inevitable challenges you will run into staging a home for a grieving homeowner:

Rather than telling her the knick knacks are tacky, you have to remember they were probably gifts from grandchildren that have been cherished over the years. Tell her that because you would hate to see anything happen to them, you think it’s best to pack them up and store them somewhere safe while the house is on the market.

Instead of making a big deal about the cat fur everywhere, tell her that some buyers may have allergies to her beloved feline and he should go somewhere else to stay while the house is being shown.

If you have no room in your budget for rental furniture, tell her how nice it will be to have freshly cleaned furniture to bring with her to her new house or to hand down to her grandchildren and suggest a good professional steam cleaning.

There are some wonderful comments on the blog. Check them out for further learning.

Please share any special challenges you have faced dealing with grieving homeowners and how you handled them by leaving a comment 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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home staging, home stager, home stagers, home staging, home staging consultation, home staging dilemma, home staging priority, staging diva

Last week, I wrote a blog post in which I confessed that I hide my own business dreams and life dreams under stacks of paper.

Now I’m trying to dig through all those piles and figure out where the good stuff is, and what I can finally give myself permission to let go of.

It’s not easy.

I’ve always been an information hoarder, that’s my personal form of clutter. I suppose it’s better than buying gadgets I’ll never use, or shoes I’ll never wear, but it’s still clutter that weighs me down.

My clutter is not in my closets, it’s all over my desk. Which is sometimes worse, because it can make me feel overwhelmed as soon as I walk in my office!

I keep generating ideas for new marketing methods for my home staging business, or new products or course ideas for teaching home stagers, or ideas to add to one of my nine websites, and they get added to one of the piles.

I know if I took everything and put it into organized files, I would lose all the ideas that are hiding inside the piles. In fact, last year I organized all the paper on my desk into three folders:

• A Priority
• B Priority
• C Priority

Trouble was, I never looked inside them again!

All that stuff I told myself was “A Priority” either wasn’t, or I already had it in my mental inventory of items I really needed to do. So I got to those items and ideas anyway without even referring to all the paper hiding inside that red “urgent, pay attention to me right now” folder.

I’m a visual person. So while I crave order, when it comes to my ideas and work, I have to see everything I plan to act on. If it’s buried in a folder, it won’t get my attention anymore. But I’m realizing that hiding something inside a stack of paper has the same problem. It’s still no longer visible to me.

The other day, I had a realization. All the little “to do” items that are represented by the stacks on my desk are of my own making.

That’s probably obvious to you, but to me it was a bit of a revelation. My To Do’s are only To Do’s because I made them so! I can just as easily make them Don’t Do’s and sweep them all into the recycling bin. It’s not like “my boss” will come in and ask me why I haven’t gotten to any of it.

I have no boss and I have been self-employed since 1989. You’d think by now I would have mastered that negative little voice in my head that says, “why aren’t you doing this, that or the other thing?” To be honest, I used to have that under control most of the time, but these last 6 months it’s really got away from me. Hence the need for a massive “fresh start” clearing of my desk.

There will never be enough hours in a day to achieve all the things we hope to accomplish. It’s critical that we keep a vigilant eye on the things we put on our To Do List so they don’t crowd out the stuff that will really build our business or enrich our lives!

Home stagers, how do you deal with this? What methods have you found for keeping track of the ideas you REALLY want to act on without letting them get buried inside a pile of “should” items that drain you of energy and inspiration? Please share your ideas by adding to the comment section.

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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

“There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams.’ Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they’re still there.” – Erma Bombeck

This quote makes me want to burst into tears with the memory of all the years I’ve done this in my own life.

Looking around my office, I realize that I also hide my dreams in stacks of papers.

In between the paid bills I need to file (or the unpaid ones I need to deal with), are the great ideas I’ve had and still not acted on.

I have to admit to myself that if I have a dream or an idea, the best course of action is to jump on it and make it happen. Once it goes into that pile, or becomes a business plan, I suck all the joy and inspiration right out of it.

Then my dream never takes flight and eventually it even gets lost from my memory!

A great example of this is that 2 years after I became a home stager, I was diving through an old pile of paper and stumbled on a newspaper article about home staging that I had cut out of a newspaper 4 years earlier.

In other words, I had:

• read about home staging and realized “that thing I did” naturally to my own houses before selling them had an actual name
• discovered it was an actual career that could make money and that it would use my creative talents and interest in real estate
• cut the article out, knowing it was something to explore further and scribbled some notes in the margin

And, that’s where it died. I put the home staging article, that represented a dream and a new possibility for my life, onto a corner of my desk to think about later!

No doubt, real life kept going on around me as I stayed busy parenting, running my other business, keeping my house clean, planning our next meals, running errands, etc.

I didn’t know how I could start a home staging business and do what the other stagers I was reading about had done. Being stuck on that “where do I start?” question became too painful.

I think that was my unconscious reason for literally burying the whole idea. The story about successful home stagers lay forgotten as more and more “to do”, “to read” or “to pay” options got dumped on top of it, eventually forming a new mountain of  paper I would never look at.

Fortunately, two years later something else put “home staging” back on my radar and I rediscovered that dream and turned it into a successful career when I started my staging business Six Elements Inc.

A big part of what inspires me to teach other home stagers how the make money doing what they love is I know how painful it is living with dreams that you take out and look at, and put back on a shelf because you don’t know how to take action on them.

I hope you’ll share your own story by adding a comment to this post. It will inspire others and help me write more articles that can help you. After all, without the wonderful comments from my readers, it’s hard to come up with what to write about three times a week!

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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home stagers, staging diva, home staging courses, staging diva sale, home staging products, home staging training sale, debra gould

I have a very hard time listening to people talk about how much they hate their job and how they “wish” they could do something else.

Being an entrepreneur, I just can’t fathom why anyone would settle to spend the majority of their life doing work they hate, taking the risk of getting to the end of their days with their song still inside them.

“Wishing” has nothing to do with leaving an unfulfilling career to pursue your passion. If you “wish” you could do something else, only you can make that wish come true through hard work and dedication, starting with an investment in your own education.

Hundreds of aspiring and established home stagers have taken advantage of the Staging Diva Dive into Summer Sale over the past couple of weeks to save up to 60% on courses, coaching and products that will further their careers.

If you’ve been wishing for change, initiate that change yourself and make the investment in your education – your future.

Tomorrow (Friday July 30) is the last day of the Staging Diva Dive into Summer Sale. I’ve put a cap on the number of courses, coaching sessions and Staging Diva Directory listings available during this sale in order to maintain my own high levels of customer service.

If previous sales patterns are any indication, these items will sell out between the time of this writing and about noon time tomorrow (Friday) as most people wait until the last minute to purchase.

It already may be too late as I’ve noticed a lot of home staging courses being sold over the past few hours. Avoid disappointment by visiting the Staging Diva Store now and make your own wish come true.

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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home stagers, staging diva, home staging courses, staging diva sale, home staging products, home staging training sale, debra gould

If you’re having a slower summer than you’d hoped or if you’re a busy home stager facing more challenges than usual, there’s an English proverb I’d like to share with you:

“A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.”

Take part in the Staging Diva Dive into Summer Sale happening until Friday of this week and see if there’s a course or resource included in the sale that may help you navigate your “rough sea.”

Or download the free Ask Staging Diva report: “Can a regular person like me become a successful home stager?” to give you loads of inspiration and confirmation that you’re doing the right thing. In this report, you’ll read the stories of 10 home stagers who were just as nervous as any of us getting started, or who faced challenges and how they dealt with them.

Every challenge you get through makes you that much better in the end.

Have you navigated a rough sea that has made you a stronger home stager? Please share by leaving a comment below.

My Client Relations Manager, Victoria, receives several emails each day asking what makes Staging Diva Training different than other programs, especially now, during the Staging Diva Dive Into Summer Sale! It’s a great question and one that I think it’s time to address here.

I am providing this information based on other programs’ claims, but especially on what I’ve heard from several of my students, who have taken these other programs before enrolling in Staging Diva courses to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

One of the key differences of Staging Diva is that my focus is on how to take your talent and turn it into a staging business.

It seems that many of these other programs spend a lot of time on decorating and understanding color wheels. My feeling is that if you don’t have any decorating talent, you shouldn’t be a home stager. You have an eye for it or you don’t!

My home staging courses were developed with the assumption that you do have that raw talent, and now you’re ready to learn how to make money from your talent.

You learn everything from how to set up your company and what forms you’re going to need, to how you’re going to do actually conduct operations and deal with clients. You won’t learn where to put the furniture in a sample room, but you will learn how to handle yourself when you’re at a home staging consultation, what changes you should usually recommend, and how to properly price your services.

With the Staging Diva home staging courses, you won’t have the expense and inconvenience of travel, or the need to put the rest of your life on hold while you sit in a classroom for two, three, or five days.

Instead you can save time and money by learning from the comfort of your own home. When you’re ready to start my home staging courses, you’ll turn on an audio recording, open your study notes and get busy.

Whether it’s convenient for you to study at night, or spend a weekend, or you want to spread the material out over several weeks, it’s entirely up to you. You can even listen to the home staging courses at your summer cottage.

You’ll hear me explain real world examples of what you’ll face as a home stager, what to say to a real estate agent or a nervous client, and how to make sure you get paid for your services.

The Staging Diva Program teaches you how to market your home staging business. I won’t be listing random information you’d find in a marketing textbook, which is what you will get in home staging courses taught by people who have never actually been home stagers or who don’t have any marketing expertise. Yes, it’s true! Some people have decided they can make money teaching home staging even though they have never actually been stagers themselves.

When you sign up for Staging Diva Training, you’re going to learn about marketing from somebody who has been marketing since the 1980s and is a published marketing author. I have a Master’s degree in Marketing, I’ve been supporting myself and my family from a home office since 1989, and I’m also a stager who has grown a successful staging business.

I’m going to tell you the marketing information you need to know as a self-employed person; what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. I’ll steer you away from expensive advertising and other techniques that less experienced marketers would recommend because they just don’t know any better.

Once you complete the five home staging courses that make up the Staging Diva Program, you can say you’re a Graduate and I’ll give you a certificate and artwork to put on your marketing materials or website to back that up.

You will not have to pay an ongoing fee to Staging Diva to say you are a Staging Diva Graduate. Annual fees are a common practice with other schools, but not here.

Ultimately, the difference between Staging Diva and other programs out there is that it’s based on the real-world experiences of someone who has personally done this.

And it really is about how to turn a talent you love into a money-making business.

If you want a decorating hobby on the side and you have no real intention of making money at it, don’t take my program because it would be a waste for you. You don’t need to take any course to do that. Go ahead and dabble and decorate! You don’t need anybody to give you permission to do that.

But if you are serious about growing a profitable home staging business and you’d rather not waste five years figuring out what mistakes to avoid, that’s what this training program is for.

I urge you to take advantage of the Staging Diva Dive Into Summer Sale! Home staging courses are limited to the first 80 registrants in order for me to uphold my high level of quality customer service. Visit the Staging Diva Store for details but hurry. The sale ends July 30 but I can’t guarantee there will still be openings left if you leave your purchase to the last minute.

Home stagers, if you’ve taken my program and another perhaps you would be willing to share some of the key differences you’ve noticed by leaving a comment below. After all, you could speak to the differences better than anyone!

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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home stagers, staging diva, home staging courses, staging diva sale, home staging products, home staging training, debra gould

If you’re sitting down with a stack of photos after a home staging consultation, struggling over the report you’re preparing for the homeowners you are really wasting your time.

Unless…

• You just love doing paperwork
• You enjoy knowing you have a lengthy report to complete before moving on to the next client
• You’re getting paid extra to write it

In my opinion, this practice is a pure waste of time…valuable time you should be using marketing your business and getting more paying clients! Preparing staging consultation reports is one of the many contributing factors to new home stagers going out of business.

Staging Diva Students learn in Course 3 “Taking the Mystery Out of Home Staging Consultations” to not do home staging reports unless all of the above conditions are true. Most often they aren’t. Unfortunately, other home staging training companies (and a certain “dummies” guide) have perpetuated this notion that home staging consultation reports are necessary.

By now, you’re probably thinking, “But everyone else does them!” Actually NOT everyone does.

I’ve staged hundreds of homes over 7 years and there are thousands of Staging Diva Graduates out there who have been following my advice for 5 years and they don’t prepare reports either.

There are a couple of reasons why doing home staging consultation reports isn’t a good use of your time.

• It’s often hours of extra work you’re not getting paid for
• If you’re services are priced properly, you’re losing hundreds of dollars with each report you write
• The client may never actually look at it
• You’re giving yourself something else to fret over
• Clients don’t want to read a great big report. They just want their house staged so it will sell faster for more money.

Home stagers, can you give me any reasons why preparing lengthy consultation reports is actually a good idea? Or if you used to do them and gave them up, tell us how you came to that decision. If you still do them, do you love it or have you found it an obligation that always feels like it’s hanging over your head?

Please comment with your own opinion and let’s discuss!

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 Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.

Technorati Tags: home staging consultation, home staging, home stagers, staging diva, home staging courses, home staging training, debra gould