With all the mixed news about the economy and the shocking drop in value of investments during the last recession, baby boomers are concerned about their retirement. Many are turning to a home staging career!
As you approach your 60s, you may feel ready to retire, but not ready to stop working all together. If you’ve already retired maybe your savings and pension aren’t quite enough to live on comfortably.
You may be toying with the idea of starting a business for a stream of revenue that will allow you the flexibility to work around vacations and visits with family.
Home staging is a fabulous field for anyone wanting to profit from their decorating talents to earn a good living. Home staging, real estate enhancement, or house fluffing as it’s sometimes called, is the art of decorating a home to sell quickly and for top dollar.
Home Staging Career Offers Flexibility and Freedom
If you have an innate talent for arranging a room to make it universally appealing then you have what it takes to become a home stager, no matter how old you are!
As a home stager, you have full control over your schedule and you don’t need a store front or home staging inventory. Plus the most complicated piece of technology you’ll need is a digital camera.
With a home stager career, you don’t have to do any heavy lifting, cleaning or painting.
Others can be brought into the staging project to provide those services. A home stager is more like a “creative director”, providing the vision for how a house can be transformed without having to actually do the physical work themselves.
And most importantly, whatever you invest in training can easily be recovered with your first home staging project.
I get emails and phone calls from people in their 50s, 60s and 70s wondering if home staging would be right for them or if they would be passed over for younger stagers.
I don’t believe this is a legitimate fear because as long as a person has the talent to decorate a house to sell, a homeowner doesn’t care how old the person is. In fact, age can sometimes be an asset because an older person usually has the first-hand experience of buying, decorating and selling their own homes over the years. That’s certainly how I got into home staging!
That experience is a real plus to clients who hire stagers to help them sell their house more quickly and at a higher price than they would have without staging.
In today’s competitive real estate market, home sellers need that skill and experience even more.
Licensed real estate appraiser, and Chicago home stager Ranee D. Strawn of Distinctive Design took the Staging Diva Training Program and made home staging her fourth career! She now experiences the kind of joy that comes with fully using one’s creative talents. 
My eldest Graduate is 76 year old Jean Smith of Staging For Sellers, who resides in a retirement community in Florida. She had two clients within weeks of completing her training.
Jean is such an inspiration to us all! At an age where most people are bemoaning the fact that they won’t get a chance to do all those things they wanted to in their youth, she dared to follow her dream.
It’s never too late to start living a more creatively satisfying life. With the economy having so many ups and downs, it’s even more reason to take control of your own destiny and protect your future.
Home Staging expert Debra Gould is the author of Ask Staging Diva: Will Home Staging Work in My Area? and is frequently profiled in the media in both the US and Canada. She developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to create opportunities for others to grow their own profitable home staging, real estate enhancement businesses.
I work for a custom home builder in Charlotte, NC, Julie LaTerra Homes, and staging has been a great asset to the clients that we work with. So many have homes to sell before they can purchase their new home and staging really helps the seller to get a better price and to reduce the number of days that they home is on the market. We offer staging as a help to our clients.
Age is irrelevant to staging. If you have knowledge and a desire to enter this profession, you should go for it!
I agree with Debra. I left a 25 year plus career in financial services last year to launch my home staging business (alright, a layoff with severance helped) and I’m in my early fifties. Right now I’m doing most of the physical work, and I sometimes wonder how many more years I’m going to last doing this, but when the time is right, I can hire people, for much less per hour than I’m getting paid, to do all of that and then I can be the creative director as Debra says. It would be great – no more lifting heavy boxes and bags, cleaning, ironing — just the fun stuff – shopping and pointing fingers where everything should go.
I, too, have been entertaining the idea of starting home staging as an ‘over 50’ career and doing lots of the work myself. I’m glad Donna has made this transition and would love to know how it works out for her in today’s tough economy. Florida it a tough market in itself with it’s predominantly low wages even in good economic times so I’m still sitting on the fence. I’ve been receiving the Staging Diva’s reports for over a year now and have found it to be the most respectable and valuable approach to this business of any on the internet. hopefully I can jump off the fence soon.
Carla
Edgewater, Florida
Thanks everyone for sharing your comments, keep them coming! The more information I have from you the more I can feature you in future articles like this one.
Carla, the fact that the real estate market and economy are tough, make this even more the right business to be in. Consider what a low cost business it is to start since you don’t need inventory or a storefront. Consider that people still need to move for a variety of reasons and what an awful time to have to sell. They need home staging services now more than ever.
In the Staging Diva Program I cover tons of ways to build your business on a shoestring. I personally spent next to nothing marketing my home staging company Six Elements Inc. and yet I was making up to $10,000 a month staging houses in my second year.
I’m glad you’ve found the materials you’ve been receiving from me over the past year helpful. You need to ask yourself, if you get this much quality info from me when you haven’t spent any money, what do you think you’ll get when you’re actually part of my inner circle?