Staging is one of the most important parts of the entire home selling process, and home staging is a fantastic career for visually-oriented people to earn a good living without an expensive education. Read on to find out how to become a home stager and make a living doing what you love.
Back to the benefits of staging for a minute and then we’ll take about how to get started in this career…
The right setup and presentation of a home can turn a buyer who’s “just curious” into someone who’s seriously interested in making an offer. More so, it can increase the value of a house and possibly put multiple buyers in a bidding war! As such, there’s a lot of work available for professional home stagers.
When the market is good and many people are buying, sellers want to take as much advantage of it as possible. But still, when the market is down a seller will be interested in getting the best price for their home, even if it means paying for the services of a professional home stager.
If this sounds like the kind of work you’d love to do, you need to figure out how to become a home stager – and do it quickly.
Table of Contents
How to Become a Home Stager
Here’s your simple 3-step guide to getting into the business of staging homes.
1. Learn the Lingo
Home staging is all about utilizing a property’s biggest money-making opportunities. It’s the process of making the nice areas of a home look even nicer and bringing the not-so-great rooms/features up to par, too.
The biggest things most home stagers focus on, though, are a home’s curb appeal and living area – i.e. the entryway, kitchen and dining, and living room.
This means your first step in becoming a professional stager is to learn what it takes to create an amazing curb appeal. Focus on every aspect from the cleanliness of the yard to the feeling potential buyers get when they walk up to the front door.
2. Take a Course
Once you have a basic understanding of the biggest areas of opportunity, it’s time to get to work. Research the latest home staging trends and take the time to look into different courses you can take, with or without certification.
Then, hit the books!
The sooner you’ve taken a course that will get you up to professional level (and by the way this can also be done through serious self-guided study), the faster you can start putting your knowledge of home staging into practice. It can also add credibility to your work. Most importantly, it can help boost your confidence.
3. Understand the Psychology of Home Staging
It’s one thing to earn a home staging certification that says you’re a professional home stager, and another to provide high-quality home staging that can create the results a seller is looking for.
Having book smarts is only part of the work. The other part is the understanding of home staging psychology.
You need to be able to walk into a room and utilize the space in the best possible manner. You should easily recognize what kind of reactions the light and color will create in buyers, and you should be able to amp up the space by appealing to the buyers’ senses, too.
This skill comes with practice. It’s something you should work on improving every single time you stage a home. Our program is unique in the online training world because we’ve built in a way for you to get hands-on practice, and have your work carefully reviewed by your instructor – so that you know you’re building up the skill set you’ll be using when you stage for clients.
How to Become a Home Stager and Open Your Own Business
There’s no limit to all the things you can achieve once you figure out how to become a home stager.
You may open your own home staging business or maybe combine this work with that of a traditional real estate agent and offer more diverse services to your audience. You could even find yourself teaming up with interior designers to work on large properties. You may want to get your certification before you get started.
