Becoming A Home Staging Professional: How to start your new career

The career of a professional home stager might seem really attractive. You don’t need to spend years at the university, you can become your own boss with free time management, the market potential is huge (there have been nearly 10,000 sold houses and condos in Toronto only in July) and your salary doesn’t need to be limited at all. Everything sounds so wonderful, doesn’t it? There are some administrative steps you have to make if you want to be a stager, but it's not too difficult. Your future customers will probably want to see your certificate from a staging course, so you should get one first. With options to rent furniture, you need only a small capital for the start-up. And then the most crucial thing is your real abilities. But before you start, it's crucial that you understand what home staging is and what it is not.

Home staging is NOT home decoration, it’s quite the contrary! While decorating, you inject your client’s personality into his home to suit him the best. Home stagers, on the other hand, should make the place free of any client's personality traits. Because you can't know who will come to see the place as a potential buyer - maybe a young professional? Elderly couple? Philosophy student? You should point out the strong sides of the property, but also the buyer should have some space left for his/her 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 developed visual imagination and creativity, of course. You will arrange dozens pieces of furniture, art and decoration into one harmonic composition. What you in any case 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 emphasized or destroyed. You have to catch the pros and cons of every property, which ask for stressing or downplaying.

First you will need to get some practice. Try it with your home, your parents’ house, your son’s condo and always ask for opinions. As soon as you are confident enough, start your own business! Get in touch with some local real estate agents and leave some business cards with them, and check for furniture rental shops in your vicinity - get some newspaper adverts for this. A lot of difficult days, weeks and months might be awaiting you. But hold on and resist, if you keep up good quality with each home you stage, it will help you to get some referrals and soon you will be able to breathe more freely. If you don't give up too soon, you will be appreciated for your ideas and determination on the home staging market.