The Profession Of A Home Stager

Professional home staging career may look pretty tempting. 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 market potential is just huge, if we realize that just in July, the number of houses and condos sold in Toronto has reached nearly 10,000. It all looks just great, you might now think. There are some administrative steps you have to take if you wish to become a stager, but it’s not too complicated. Your future clients will probably want to see your diploma from a staging course, so you should get one first. You can usually use some of the furniture rental services, so you just need a small capital for the start-up. Then your real skills come into question. But before you start, it’s crucial that you understand what home staging is and what it is not.

First – home staging is NOT the same as home decoration, but quite the contrary! While decorating, you insert your client’s personality into his home to suit him the best. On the other hand, home staging means removing the client’s personality from the place. You don’t know who the prospective buyer would be – young professional? Retired couple? A student of philosophy? The point is that you emphasize the opportunities the place offers, but still leave some space for the buyer’s own imagination.

To become a good house staging professional, you need developed visual imagination and creativity, but also the empathy with various kinds of people. You will arrange dozens pieces of furniture, art and decoration into one meaningful composition. What you absolutely must have is the proper eye for detail – it will be up to you to decide 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. You have to find the pros and cons of every property, which call for stressing or downplaying.

First you will need to get some experience. Try it with your home, your parents’ home, your son’s apartment and always ask for opinions. And then, when you get some confidence, go to the real business! Leave a few business cards with the local real estate agents, buy some newspaper adverts and check for furniture rental places around. In the following days, weeks and months, you will have to work very hard. But if you will be able to resist and will constantly deliver good quality with each place you stage, soon you will get some referrals, which will help you to breathe more freely. If you don’t give up too soon, you will be rewarded for your ideas and determination on the home staging market.