Summary
Building a business around your innate talents dramatically increases your chance of success. Home staging expert Debra Gould shares her list of the 5 must-have skills for anyone contemplating a home staging business.
Successful home stagers need these 5 skills
After staging tens of millions of dollars worth of real estate and teaching over 1000 others around the world how to start a home staging business, home staging expert Debra Gould has compiled the following list of skills and talents she feels a professional home stager should have.
Gould developed this list by observing which students from the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program tend to be the most successful early on as real estate stagers. These “skills” are actually innate talents or interests, not necessarily learned through training.
1. A natural talent for decorating and working with color.
You should be a creative individual, have a sense of space and be visual. That doesn’t mean you need to be a trained interior designer to be a home stager. No amount of training can substitute for raw talent and the ability to visualize a space and everything in it.
2. An interest in real estate.
If you’re going to be a successful home stager, you have to love looking at homes. One of the homework assignments that Gould gives her students is to visit open houses and pretend each home belongs to a client. In your head, walk through the house and think about what you would do in each room. It’s an excellent way to see if you have an innate sense for this line of work.
3. Strong organizational skills.
You need to be very organized and be able to pay attention to detail, because it is the details in the house that make a difference in a home staging project. Often times, clients are emotionally attached to the house and all its possessions, and they cannot look at it with the same objective eye that a professional can.
When visiting clients’ homes, you are going to walk into some very chaotic environments. You will be surprised by the manner in which many people live, no matter the price of their house or whether they are rich or poor. In order to be a home stager, you have to be somebody who innately likes to create order out of chaos.
4. Ability to work well under pressure.
You must be able to work under very tight time lines. Very few people call six months before they are going to sell a house. Most call only one to two weeks before they are listing their home, or after it is already on the market. That doesn’t leave much time to complete the transformation, and you’ll need to keep your cool even when your client is most anxious.
5. Ability to work well with others when necessary.
You need to be comfortable dealing with different types of people and with people who are often under stress, because selling a home can be very stressful.
Many times, you will deal with couples who are divorcing or a family who is moving because a parent is being transferred or a person whose elderly parent has passed away.
Part of what makes someone a good home stager is being able to walk into any situation and calm the person down. You are bringing proven experience to the table to help the homeowner expedite the selling process. It is a valuable service to help someone through this stressful situation and break things down into manageable chunks.
Don’t take your natural talents for granted!
Often we take for granted the things that we naturally do well and assume that everyone else knows how to do these things too. But that’s not the case, otherwise there wouldn’t be millions of ugly homes on the market.
Not everyone has a natural talent for decorating. But building a business around our innate skills dramatically increases our chances of success and enjoyment in what we do.
If you feel like you have some or all of the above-mentioned traits, use your natural talents to seize the opportunity to make a living and a life doing what you love. Staging Diva offers a free quiz to see if home staging is the right career for you.
About the Author Debra Gould
Entrepreneur and Home Staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva, knows how to make money as a home stager. Discover her secrets to business success in the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program.
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