BEHIND THE SCENES PEEK - WHAT IT TAKES TO PULL OFF A SUCCESSFUL HOME STAGING PROJECT
MORE THAN LOGISTICS
What is staging? It’s bringing furniture, decor and other items into a property so buyers can more easily imagine themselves living in the space. Pretty simple, right? Well not so fast…
Home staging is about so much more than placing furniture in a home, which, if you have ever moved into a new home and spent hours, if not days, months, or years figuring out the best layout for your living room, you know “just placing furniture” can actually be quite challenging.
Home staging is about presenting an aspirational lifestyle to the ideal buyer.
A great stager performs a market assessment to identify the ideal buyer for each home, understand that buyer’s wants, needs and desires and the life they aspire to, and then translate that information into a design plan. It’s a significant undertaking, and one that is most effectively performed by a talented and trained stager.
But, that’s not what this post is about! This post is about everything else that needs to happen to pull off a great home staging project – “the logistics.”
HOME STAGING IS HARD WORK
We know… it looks like magic - a beautifully appointed home done in a day. But, it takes so much to make it look easy.
We appreciate why sellers, and even sometimes agents or developers, balk at the cost of home staging services. It’s a significant outlay of cash. And, let’s face it, hiring a stager requires a leap of faith. Typically there is little time for presenting renderings or explaining to the homeowner or agent in advance how the staging will be performed. The clients must simply trust it will happen and be effective.
There are many reasons why sellers should always consider staging their homes before listing. And, if clients fully understand what’s required to pull off the job, the cost of staging is much easier to digest. In fact, when you consider the typical return on investment with staging, it’s downright cheap.
According to a published study from the Real Estate Stagers of America, with an average investment of 1% of the sale price into staging, approximately 75% of sellers saw a return on their investment of 5-15% over asking price. On a $1M home, that’s a return of $50 - 150K on a $10K investment!
So here we break it down, step by step, what stagers must do to pull off these results.
THE CLIENT INQUIRY
When a client calls to inquire about staging services, the journey begins. After collecting the information from the agent or homeowners about the project, the stager will schedule an appointment to visit the property.
Prior to visiting the property, a good stager will do research on the internet and by driving the neighborhood to collect as much information as possible about the home and the location prior to the visit. Stagers need to determine what kind of person is attracted to the neighborhood. Is it families, young couples? Are there mostly starter homes, or luxury properties in the area? Are there big businesses around or within a close commute that attract certain professionals?
HOME STAGING VISIT
When visiting the home for the first time, the stager will likely be meeting the homebuyers – who most often pay the stager’s fee. A good stager will understand that selling a home is a stressful experience, and people are emotionally attached to their homes. Stagers must be considerate, kind and respectful, even if the property is not in the best shape and there is a lot of work to be done prior to staging. Sometimes the stager is in the difficult position of telling the sellers they need to make changes to make their home attractive to buyers. A good stager is able to show buyers why things need to be changed without turning them off or insulting them.
In addition to navigating complicated interactions with sellers, the stager collects the details necessary to stage.
They take photos of every room from every angle, measure the dimensions of each room, noting windows, doors and closets, so they have a rough floor plan to use when crafting a staging estimate and ultimately planning the stage.
It’s also important, and often incredibly valuable, to speak with the agent separately. A good agent will already be thinking about the ideal buyer and will have ideas about how to stage each room (i.e: should the awkward room with no closet be staged as an office or a playroom for our ideal buyer?).
The stager returns to the office or warehouse to craft a proposal and sends it to the client.
Note that at this point the stager has already invested several hours on the project, but they have not yet made a dollar.
HOME STAGING PREPARATION
Once the client has accepted the proposal and a staging date is locked in, the design process, which is unique for each stager, begins. It takes time to compose a staging plan that will reach the ideal buyer on an emotional level while taking into account the right amount of pieces and decor in each room, the best layout and proper scale and balance of textures and colors.
Back to logistics - the stager needs to line up the movers, pull from storage each piece that will be used for the project and record the job and status of each of those pieces in the inventory tracking system. The inventory tracking system keeps tabs on where each item is housed – in the warehouse or in a staged home, for example.
The system must be kept current in order for stagers to know what is available when they are planning each stage. Prior to a stage, an order must be created in the inventory tracking system and a list of every item that is going into the home is generated.
Stagers need to inspect their items to make sure they are staging ready and replace or repair items as needed before the stage. Many stagers don’t have all of their own inventory and they utilize rental companies or they source new pieces for each stage as they go. This requires hours of shopping, unboxing and assembling furniture and decor items, or finding rental companies with the pieces needed, contracting with them and arranging for delivery of rentals.
HOME STAGING DAY
Finally staging day arrives. Everything is carefully packed and loaded into the truck or trucks. Remember, we’re not just talking sofas, chairs, rugs and other furniture.
Staging requires plants, art, decorative items, mattresses, bedding, pillows, curtains, curtain rods, books, record players, toys, lamps (and dreaded lampshades, which are impossible to transport without causing damage), and the list goes on. Plus, staging requires tools! Drills, hammers, picture hanging kits, vacuums, steamers, and other cleaning gear, garbage bags, and a variety of other items stagers use to tie everything up like a bow.
Assuming the property is easy to access (we’re talking ground floor, not elevators or parking issues), the truck gets unloaded at the property and items are placed generally in the rooms to which they were assigned in the staging plan. This part is simple. But, there is always some amount of tweaking involved – should we switch the benches in the living and bedroom?, should the record player go in the office or the family room?, would the living room rug be better in the great room?… all that rethinking that is inevitable with creative minds.
Then each room must be set up and styled. This requires hanging draperies, hanging art, steaming bedding, curtains and slipcovers and styling each shelf and furniture surface just right so it achieves the perfect amount of warmth and style. It takes time, but it’s so gratifying when it’s done and done well.
After the stage, any items that were not used in the stage must be brought back to the warehouse and put back in inventory in the tracking system.
WHILE THE HOME IS STAGED
While the home remains staged, stagers watch the listing status to anticipate when they may need to destage the property. If the home remains staged beyond the initial rental period, stagers need to bill their clients for the additional furniture rental time and rental companies must be contacted to extend those agreements.
Stagers will also access the property to check on staging conditions. It’s good to make sure everything is still looking fresh. With regular heavy traffic in a home, towels can get dirty, slipcovers can wrinkle, and even some furniture can get damaged and need to be replaced.
END OF THE HOME STAGING PROJECT
Hopefully, the home sells easily due to the great staging. Then it all needs to be broken down before closing. Often there isn’t much of a window between the appraisal and final inspection and the closing, so stagers are often asked to remove furniture with little notice.
Again the movers and trucks need to be lined up and the team goes in. They wrap and repack each item. During this process, stagers will check items for damage. When everything arrives back at the warehouse, each item needs to be updated in the inventory tracking system.
SO THERE YOU HAVE IT
Those were the general logistics required to stage a home. And, we didn’t even cover the actual staging design phase, or any of the regular work that’s required to sustain a staging business like marketing, reviewing and updating inventory or managing employees.
We hope you appreciate why stagers charge good money for their services.
And, more importantly, we hope you have a newfound appreciation for your stager.
