Home Staging Occupation

How, exactly, do stagers do their work? If you have followed along our three step staging program, you know what stagers do. How they go about their business day is another thing. All businesses have best practices and procedures in order for the work to flow smoothly including the home staging occupation. We have already talked about laying the groundwork , planning and budgeting, and marketing and sales for a new home staging occupation business.

But what about the work itself, how is it accomplished using best business practices?

What systems and checks are in place to make sure that the work is done accurately and on time?

The business school term for these processes is production. Here, we'll show you how to produce professional work using best practices.

Let's walk through a typical day in the life of a stager.

9:00 am Your home staging occupation has brought you to work on a bright Tuesday morning. You begin your day by going over the photos you took of the staging project you did yesterday. You want to make sure that you pick the best photos to place in the customer file (more on this later) and to save on your hard drive to use on your website or in marketing materials.

Best Business Practice...Being organized with a good filing system and up to date files helps you be more efficient. These photos can be used in marketing materials and in a carry-along portfolio that you can bring to potential customers so they can see samples of your work.

9:45 The phone rings. It is a real estate agent you met at a walk-a-thon last month. She remembered you and that you had a staging business. (Yes, networking does work.)

This agent just got a call from a homeowner who has a lovely home in the best part of town. The homeowner wants to sell and retire to a warmer climate. The agent knows that there will be a lot of competition for this listing and wants to offer staging as a value added service to her listing package.

Your home staging occupation is now a part of this agent's team. You thank the agent for calling you and simply ask, "How can I help you?"

The agent wants to know what you might be able to do to the home's existing decor to help it sell quickly. Without seeing the home, it will be difficult to propose a plan or recommend a strategy. However, knowing that this homeowner is about to retire, you think that the decor could be outdated and there might be a fair amount of clutter from years of living in the same home.

Your response to the agent is that it's hard to tell without seeing the property, but in your experience, homes in that part of town require 2 hours staging for the living room and foyer and and additional 1 and 1/2 hours of staging time for the dining room. If your hourly work rate is $100 per hour, you could guesstimate that it might cost $350 to stage these three rooms in the home.

At this point in the conversation, you suggest that the agent bring you with at the appropriate time so you can survey the project firsthand and that you would be glad to do this for the agent free of charge. At that time, you will give the agent a formal proposal (more on this later) which will detail your recommendations and action plan. The agent ends the conversation and promises to get back to you with more information when its available. You thank the agent for the call and repeat your willingness to help get the listing.

Best Business Practice...Being a good listener will help you learn about the agent and the customer. (You can't learn anything with your mouth open!) Phone manners are very important to portray a professional work image for you and your company. Take notes during the conversation so that you can refer back to them. Start a client folder for this potential project so you can keep everything associated with this project organized and at arm's reach.

10:30 am Another project you are working on has a kitchen that is from the mid-'80s and the homeowner has a modest budget to remodel the kitchen. With only $250 to work with, you have your work cut out for you. That kind of budget limits your options and you start to compile a list of fixes that might fit into the budget:

Best Business Practice...Being prepared with a to-do list and a concept for the job is important. You will not waste valuable time not knowing what supplies you will need to bring to a job. Lists will also help you schedule outside services such as painters and carpenters so that they can finish their tasks in the proper order. The perfect place for these lists and to write down your thoughts is in a project folder.

11:30 am Get in car and drive to a few brokers' open houses in the area. (If your city is like ours, agents have a special day during the week when they open homes that are newly listed for other brokers to preview.) Visit 5 houses, introduce our company to the five brokers, leave brochures and business cards.

Best Business Practice...Prospecting for new agents and new business will keep your sales pipeline full. No sales = no profit = no home staging occupation. Always be on the lookout for new connections to make. You never know where that next big job will come from!

1:30 pm Back to the kitchen. The homeowner has decided to purchase new appliances which will help update the mechanicals in the kitchen. Decide on new door hardware, a black and nickel light fixture for over the island , new Coventry Grey paint for the walls and a tile backsplash (will try and find plain, inexpensive white subway tile.) See the before and after photos of this kitchen on our Before and After page.

Best Business Practice...Taking before shots of homes that you preview saves time. You can refer back to the photos when you are working on a concept for the redesigned space. This will eliminate the need to bother the homeowner again and again. "After" photos are also great for your portfolio.

3:00 pm Agent calls back on the potential listing you discussed earlier in the day. She wants to meet you at the home tomorrow at 10:00 to do a walk through so a more formal proposal can be generated.

Best Business Practice...When humanly possible, make your day work around your customers' schedules, not the other way around. Without them, you have no job, no home staging occupation.

3:30 pm Back in the car to drive to home you will be meeting the agent at tomorrow. Need to do a thorough examination of the outside of the home from the street so that the curb appeal section of the proposal is done before tomorrow. This will help you turn around the proposal more quickly if this is done in advance.

Best Business Practice...You don't want to take more of your agent's or homeowner's time than absolutely necessary. If you can do part of the legwork without them, they will thank you for your consideration.

3:45 pm Take a good look at the subject house from the street. Assess what could be done to the exterior to make it more appealing. Take a few pictures. (Note: It is illegal to take pictures of a home without the homeowner's permission if you are standing on private property. If you stand on the public street or sidewalk, then you can take pictures, but always ask the agent if it is okay to do first.) These pictures will help personalize the proposal you will create for the homeowner and agent.

Best Business Practice...We always use a picture of the subject house on the front page of our proposals. First of all, it personalizes the proposal for the homeowner and agent so that they feel that you have spent a great deal of time working for them already. Secondly, the picture serves as a reminder of the house. When you have a lot of projects going at once, you need all the help you can get remembering what is going on where. Pictures help...a lot!

4:45 pm Back to the office. You've decided on a plan for the '80s kitchen and order the items from you list.

Best Business Practice...We have developed an entire catalog of items we use when we stage houses as well as our favorite sources that offer good prices and quick delivery. 99% of these items can be ordered online. Physically running around to find staging props and furniture no longer fits into our schedule. We don't get reimbursed for the time it takes to travel from store to store so online ordering is our way to save time, get consistent delivery of good products, and know exactly when we will receive the merchandise. Our favorite online resources are listed for you in our Resource Guide.

Lots to do everyday -- even when we are not physically staging a home! These are the days when we tend to our business to keep all the gears well oiled and running smoothly. You can too!

Keeping well ordered business records will help you save time so that you can spend most of your time doing the work you enjoy, not bookwork and paperwork.

We use project folders for all our proposals and jobs. Paper inevitably accumulates on each job, and our project folders tame those papers and organizes them all in one place. (If you would like to obtain a copy of our project folder jacket that you can duplicate for each of your jobs, just follow the link to our eBusiness forms download.)

You are in this home staging occupation, no doubt, to make money and provide a better livelihood for your family. It is very important, then, to keep track of your time and costs so that you charge enough for a job and your services so that you can actually make money. We keep track of even the smallest expenses on our job folder worksheet so that we always know where we stand vis-a-vis our profit. Don't try and keep all the numbers in your head for four or five jobs at once. Write your expenses down and keep the receipts (in the job folder, of course).

Good records such as these are a great help come tax time and having the receipts and all data pertaining to one job in one place makes it easy for your accountant (or you!) to prepare your tax returns.

In addition to keeping track of income and expenses, we also keep a copy of our "Staging Proposal" in the job folder. This folder travels with us to the job site, to the hardware store when we purchase wood screws and helps us stay organized.

Our "Staging Proposal" form is also part of our eBusiness forms download package. This is the exact form that we use when we first visit a home to do a walk-through.

Our proposal form contains a listing of rooms and spaces in and around the home. It also helps us quickly zero in on what needs to be done to each room and how much time we estimate it will take to complete a staging of the space. There are also spaces to indicate where we will need to bring in staging props or rent or buy furniture. This proposal form is indispensable for our business. It tells the homeowner exactly what needs to be done, how much we will charge for the work we will do, and how much time it will take us to complete our tasks. It gets us both on the "same page" so to speak so that there are no misunderstandings or omissions.

There is a space for the homeowner to agree to the work for a specified price which serves as a contract between us and the homeowner or agent that hires us.

Best business practice... Putting things in writing is always a good idea, whether you are in the staging business or the dry cleaning business.

There are a great many ways to have a profitable, well-run business. Our business philosophy is to treat the client with the utmost respect, do good work on-time and on-budget and make sure that we are always organized and prepared.

Return to Home Staging Occupation or go to the next article Fees for Home Staging Services.