Home Staging As Your New Career: How To Start
If you have heard about a professional home staging career, you may think – wow, that’s great! There is no need to study for long years at the university, you can be self-employed and manage your own time, and your income doesn’t have to have any limits – the business potential is just huge, if we realize that just in July, the number of houses and condos sold in Toronto has reached almost 10,000. Everything sounds so perfect, doesn’t it? There are some administrative steps you have to take if you wish to become a stager, but it’s not too complicated. You just need to get a diploma from a staging course so that you have something to present yourself to your customers. No big capital is necessary for starting this kind of a business, as there are many possibilities to rent furniture. And then the most important thing is your real abilities. But first, you have to know what home staging means.
It may seem like home staging means the same as home decoration, but this is NOT true! Home decorators have to understand their client’s personality and then decorate the home to suit his/her features the best. Home stagers, on the other hand, should make the place free of any client’s personality features. Since you can never know who the potential buyer will be – maybe a young professional? A couple of elderly people? A student of philosophy? The goal is that you emphasize the opportunities the property offers, but still leave some space for the buyer’s own imagination.
A good home staging professional should be empatic enough to be able to get along with all sorts of customers – apart from having a great visual imagination and creativity, of course. You will arrange dozens pieces of furniture, art and decoration into a single coherent composition. What you absolutely should have is the proper eye for detail – it will be up to you to determine if when you put together a candle, a bowl of fruits or a book with a pair of glasses, the specific spirit of the place would underlined or gone for good. If you look closely, at each place you will find some pros and cons, asking to be stressed or downplayed.
First you will need to get some practice. Try it with your home, your parents’ house, your son’s apartment and always ask for opinions. Once you are confident enough, start your own business! For a start, contact some real estate agents in your vicinity and leave some of your business cards with them. Buy some newspaper adverts to check for some furniture rental stores around your neighbourhood. A lot of hard days, weeks and months might be awaiting you. Nevertheless, if you manage to hold on and keep up consistent quality of your work, you will soon get some referrals and those will help you further. Don’t give up, just go on and your ideas and determination will for sure be rewarded in the business.
