What If I Have a Real Estate License and I Prefer Home Staging?

Many people who are studying for their real estate license, or already have one, wonder what to do when they discover they’re actually more interested in home staging than being a REALTOR.

They discover their passion for color and decorating, and then question what benefits they’ll have from keeping their real estate license.

I’ll address these issues here.

Real Estate or Home Staging, Which Comes First?

One of the things you’re going to have to think about is whether you want to be:

A real estate agent who happens to stage homes.

A home stager who happens to have a real estate license.

This is not as subtle a distinction as you might think!

A real estate agent who happens to stage homes

If you chose “a real estate agent who happens to stage homes,” then your focus will be on earning your living from real estate commissions. You might stage your listings for free, or you might charge for it.

But, either way, you’ll be looking at home staging as your secondary business.

More of your time will be spent on trying to get your own listings or sell other people’s listings as a buyers agent.

With this route, your “pay day” only comes after a deal closes. You have many expenses along the way to market your own (or others’) real estate listings.

Plus you have expenses driving clients around to showing appointments. This can go on for months or years before your real estate clients actually buy, or sell, anything!

Remember you don’t get paid until they do. That’s why home stagers make more money than real estate agents.

In my next post in this series, I’ll discuss the choice of being a home stager who happens to have a real estate license. In other words, whether it’s a benefit to be a Realtor at all when your real love (and the focus of your business) is decorating homes to sell, instead of getting (or selling) real estate listings.

Until then, please share you comments on the discussion so far and post any questions related to this overall topic that I can tackle in future articles in this series.

I’d also love more points of view so feel free to click the “Share” buttons below and invite your Facebook or LinkedIn staging friends to comment too!

Comments

jack says

July 9, 2013 at 9:56 pm

I agree that for new agents, the challenge will be to get through the rough periods when they do not have a stable income. In my opinion, proper budgeting will play an important role at the beginning. Nice post!
Kirsten says

June 15, 2017 at 3:53 pm

I really like the perspective of your post! Many people look at Real-Estate Agents as though they have a glamorous life when in reality, things can get quite nitty gritty at times.
- Debra Gould says
  
  June 19, 2017 at 6:18 pm
  
  Totally agree Kirsten, thanks for commenting!

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Real Estate or Home Staging, Which Comes First?

A real estate agent who happens to stage homes

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