Home Stagers – Don’t Undervalue Your Services!
By Debra Gould

Home staging is an extremely lucrative career if you know how to properly charge for your services.

It makes me cringe when I hear figures as low as $31.45 per hour being touted as ‘great income’ for a home stager. That is an impossibly low rate for any independent professional to charge, but an expert home stager should actually be making at least double if not four or five times that amount.

Home sellers stand to profit anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 after employing the services of a home stager, so they are willing to pay a premium for that expertise. The cheapest stager in town will only attract clients who don’t really value what a home stager does. After all, if you save a few hundred dollars on staging advice but you don’t get the results you hoped for, what was the point?

The knowledge of an expert home stager is extremely valuable because of the effect it can have on how long a home takes to sell and its final selling price. A two hour home staging consultation should cost anywhere from $250-$800. After the initial consultation, a home stager can make at least $1,000 if the client wants the stager to complete the home staging project for them. This figure can go as high as $5,000 to $10,000 depending on the needs for that property, the home stager’s expertise and where they live. Typically costs will be higher in major urban centers where house prices are also higher. If the home stager has to furnish and/or accessorize the home, that price can creep even higher.

Now back to why I object to anyone advertising $31.45 as a good income for a home stager. It completely devalues what we do and the difference our work makes to a client. Not only that, it misleads aspiring stagers into believing that this is a good income.

Even bumping that pay from $31.45 up to $40 per hour, if you do three two-hour staging consultation each week, that works out to $240 per week or roughly $960 per month. If you also do three “full-blown” staging projects each month which each take you five hours, you can make an additional $600. That’s an unimpressive $1,560 per month or about $18,700 per year.

Depending on where you live, that amount would classify you as part of the “working poor,” and comes out to around what you’d make answering phones or asking “would you like fries with that?”

When you’re self employed, you have lots to do that you don’t get paid for. For example, talking to prospective customers, standing in line at the bank, doing your paperwork, etc. So when you are working on a client’s behalf, you need to make sure you are well paid for it.

If you charge a rate of $300 per two-hour home staging consultation which is still at the lower end of the industry standard, those same three staging consultations a week will give you $900 per week or $3,600 per month. Those three “full-blown” staging projects per month will give you another $2,250 per month. That’s a total of $5,850 per month or $70,200 per year.

That’s $70,200 per year versus the $18,700 you would make earning $40 per hour.

If you want to grow a profitable home staging business rather than dabble in home staging as a hobby, you have to charge a fair rate for your services.

I can’t fathom a home stager charging anything close to $30 or even $40 per hour unless they are working full time for another company who will be reselling their services at the more appropriate rate. Advertising a home staging hourly rate of $31.45 does nothing but de-value the service. As a home stager, you’re operating a business. Can you possibly sustain (let alone grow) a successful business of any kind at such a low hourly rate? When you’re operating a service-based business, time is your product and we are all only given so much of that each day!

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould is president of Six Elements and creator of The Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 900+ Graduates worldwide. Debra is the author of two home staging guides and offers a Directory of Home Stagers to help homeowners and real estate agents locate home stagers who will decorate homes to sell for top dollar.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debra_Gould
http://EzineArticles.com/?Home-Stagers—Dont-Undervalue-Your-Services!&id=1401025

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Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.) The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets. That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line. Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.

Technorati Tags: Debra Gould, home stager, Home Staging, stager, Staging div

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debra_Gould

Technorati Tags: home staging, home staging business, Debra Gould, home based business, work from home, home staging training, real estate staging, women oriented business, women oriented businesses,

Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.) The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets. That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line. Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.

Technorati Tags: Debra Gould, home based business, Home Staging, home staging business, Home Staging Training, real estate staging, women oriented business, women oriented businesses, work from home

The Staging Diva is one of the best known personalities in home staging circles. It should not come as a surprise that one of the tactics she uses to attain and maintain that position is article marketing.

You may not be as articulate and experienced a writer but that’s not necessary either, We will continue to post home staging articles here from top notch writers and more everyday ones to demonstrate to you that article writing is another tool you can put in your arsenal.

If you would like to get an excellent how to resource on article marketing I highly recommend Doug Champigny’s Beginners Key to Understanding Article Marketing

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Home Staging Marketing Tactics That Will Put You Out of Business – Part 1

Unfortunately, many individuals with a talent for decorating attempt to become home stagers without any kind of business training or marketing knowledge. With the best of intentions they stumble into some awful marketing tactics that will put them out of business faster than you can say, “What were they thinking?”

When you’ve made a career of being a home stager, like any business you might run, marketing must be a focus of your efforts to generate a steady stream of paying clients. Unfortunately, some home stagers aren’t portraying an image of professionalism, which not only hurts their own success, but casts a bad light on the home staging industry as a whole.

Before I entered the home staging industry, I owned a marketing consulting firm where I used my MBA and experience working for advertising agencies to help promote Fortune 500 companies. It pains me to see tacky marketing gimmicks being used by any company. But it’s worse when it’s a staging business because I sincerely want to see people succeed in this field and raise the standards in the industry. That’s why, when I train others to become home stagers, there’s a great deal of focus placed on smart marketing techniques.”

The following are some of the worst marketing tactics I’ve seen carried out by home stagers:

Using sexy as a selling point.

It’s true that sex sells, but it’s a terrible idea to use your sex appeal to sell home staging services for many reasons.

* It’s not safe. You’re going to a stranger’s home, most likely by yourself. If you don’t want to put yourself in a bad situation, don’t claim to be a sexy home stager.
* It’s irrelevant. As long as you can present a polished image and prove your ability to transform a property to appeal to buyers, it doesn’t matter what you look like.
* It’s inappropriate. Usually, the marketing I’ve seen by home stagers who are trying to attract customers based on their level of sexiness is just ridiculous and it’s impossible to take these stagers seriously.

I recently came across a “home staging” website featuring a strange animated character telling the world that she was her state’s sexiest stager. The whole thing was strange. After the animated head introduced herself as her state’s sexiest stager she said that if you want your home to sell fast and for top dollar you should stay tuned for weekly tips on sexy staging.

Then the animated head tells a joke: What is the difference between broccoli and boogers? Kids won’t eat broccoli. Which led her to sharing the day’s sexy staging tip which was (and months later still is), “Remember to clean the boogers off the walls before you put your house on the market.”

This is enough to make any reasonable adult cringe, and would lead even a teenager to ask, ‘Is this a real home staging business?”

Nobody is going to trust that person to prepare their largest asset to sell. There are ways to use video effectively to enhance your marketing message, but a “sexy” animated robot, especially one joking about “boogers”, is not one of them.

In part two of this series of articles, learn why offering a guaranteed sale based on home staging services is a terrible marketing idea.

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould, president of Six Elements and creator of The Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 900+ Graduates worldwide. Debra is the author of two home staging guides and 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

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debra_Gould

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Learn how to use article marketing to build traffic to your web site and build your reputation in the home staging universe. Get a copy of the Beginners Key to Understanding Article Marketing by Doug Champigny.

Setting up a web page is only the beginning to online marketing. Now you need to get it seen by potential customers. This used to be challenging in many markets, but there has been a big change in what matters. Today, what matters is being seen on the Google Places Page, and you don't even need to have a web site to do that. (although you should.) The good news is that its free, and if you know what you are doing, you can maneuver yourself to the top listing in many markets. That's one of the skill sets I bring to the table. If you would like to get your Google Places Page properly set up send me an email at enetwal@gmail.com and put "Free Initial Evaluation" or something similar in the subject line. Be sure to include your current web site and contact info.

Technorati Tags: Articel Marketing, Debra Gould, Ezines Articles