One of the top reasons for not making enough money in home staging is not charging enough. Which is generally linked to a lack of confidence. It’s important to consider how much is home staging worth to your clients?
Regardless of how insecure you feel, your clients will make a lot more from your home staging than you will on any given project.
Here are 3 tips to help you establish your home staging fees:
1. Consider all the time you don’t get paid for.
For example, preparing for a client appointment, answering potential clients’ questions in advance, scheduling and re-scheduling appointments, travel time, follow up calls (before, during and after the project), keeping track of client expenses and time on each project, bookkeeping, standing in line at the bank, etc.
If you think $100 or even $250 per hour is too much to charge a client, remember the many hours you put into your home staging business that no one pays for.
2. Consider how much is home staging worth to your clients.
Rather than being caught up in how much you feel worthy of charging, think for a moment about the tangible benefits you bring to your home staging clients.
Do you believe you provide real value to your clients? If you don’t believe this, it will be very difficult to convince them.
It might help to think about how much financial value you can bring to a client if you do the job well.
Don’t fall into the trap of feeling embarrassed about your rates. Done well, a home staging project should generate anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 profit for the homeowner. Plus, it often leads to a much speedier sale, which has significant financial and psychological benefits for your clients.
So, why shouldn’t a professional home stager be paid well?
My client’s house sold for $71,000 over the asking price.
The client invested about $900 in my advice during a home staging consultation.
Someone could easily say, “Wow, $900 just for advice, that’s a lot of money! It’s not like you’re a lawyer or brain surgeon!”
But if you asked, “What if you could invest $900 and make $71,000?”, few people would consider that too expensive.
Home Staging is an investment in a potentially significant financial return for the client. Consider this when determining your rates.
3. Remember that when you’re in a service business you are selling your time.
You have limited “inventory” so make sure you’re not always “on sale!” Since you can’t manufacture more hours in a week, the only way to earn more is to charge more for your time.
The Staging Diva course “The Business of Home Staging: What you need to start and how to grow” includes a detailed discussion of pricing strategy.
If you’ve already taken the course, now is a great time to review your notes and the course recordings so you make sure you earn what you’re worth this real estate season.
If you haven’t taken course 2, you can order a recording of it right now, while I’m still selling our course modules individually. You’ll make back your investment in this course easily on your first client because I share everything I’ve learned about pricing based on my MBA training and the real world experience of being an independent entrepreneur since 1989.
I built a lucrative home staging business from scratch in a very competitive market.
In Staging Diva course 2, you’ll learn what I charged clients when I started and how I systematically increased my rates over time.
I’ll share the single biggest discovery I made in how to best price home staging services for profit.
You’ll also learn what home stagers charge in various markets and how to avoid the many mistakes they’re making!
Discover the ONLY Home Staging Business Training Program taught by a seasoned entrepreneur who has successfully grown her own home staging business (not as a side-line to selling real estate) — The Staging Diva Training Program. With an MBA in marketing and hundreds of home staging clients, internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould, The Staging Diva, is uniquely qualified to train others how to start and grow a profitable home staging business.
