You have a great eye for knowing how to arrange a room. You enjoy repositioning furniture in your home. You love to shop for new accessories to change the look of a room. You would love to turn your passion into a career. So you ask yourself, is that enough to start a career in home staging?
Does that sound like you? Those interests are almost a necessity for someone interested in home staging. So you already have a great start.
There are many great aspects of career of home staging. There is freedom to work your own hours. Freedom to work for yourself. Applying your love of transforming a space into something that is more appealing and welcoming. Getting to see a lot of different homes, meet many different people, make relationships, and do most of it while not sitting at a desk.
All of that may sound great. But is home staging the right career move for you? Do you have the right personality to turn your passion into a career. Anyone can be a successful home stager, but having the following traits will make the career more enjoyable.
5 Traits of a Successful Home Stager
Having a love for decorating is an important trait for being a home stager, but it isn’t enough. There are many traits that are important to have to be successful in a home staging career. If you don’t have all of these traits, then don’t worry, because you can get trained on most of them well enough to get by.
Let’s see what some of the traits that most successful home stagers have.
1. Outgoing
You will be working directly with your clients, networking with people and groups, reaching out to prospective clients, and probably seeking out people to subcontract, like movers. Ideally, you are comfortable talking to different types of people.
2. Organized
You will be balancing a lot of plates. In addition to staging a home, you also have to handle billing, paying expenses, prospecting for clients, networking, shopping for accessories and furniture, tracking where your accessories and furniture are, scheduling movers and other help, updating your website to show new projects and testimonials, and many other tasks. Oh, and don’t forget to set aside some time to have a life. As my first boss told me, “we don’t live to work, we work to live.”
3. Confident in selling yourself
You will need clients. Although referrals will be a large part of getting clients, you can’t rely on others to sell your home staging skills. It’s up to you to sell yourself. That means networking and prospecting. Do you have your elevator pitch? Are you able to explain why someone should hire you instead of some other home stager? Are you willing to reach out to Realtors, developers, and home sellers to tell them how you can help them? Confidence sells.
4. Entrepreneurial
You will no longer be clocking in to your 9 to 5 job. You won’t have a boss giving you your next project. You won’t have wait until your annual review to get that 3% raise you worked so hard for. As a home stager, you are your own boss, you set your own schedule, and the quality of your work and the amount of effort you put into your job will dictate how much you earn. Entrepreneurs are excited to be in charge of their career and to be solely accountable for their own success.
5. Interest in real estate
Ok, so this isn’t the most important trait of a home stager, but it is an inherent part of the job to work with people in the real estate profession. One goal of home staging is to help the potential buyer imagine themselves in the home by showing them how the home flows and can be arranged. The other goal of home staging is to help the homeowner (or developer, or Realtor) showcase their property to generate as much interest as possible, which translates to them getting offers sooner and at a higher sale price. An interest in real estate will make learning what helps to showcase a property easier. And an interest in working with real estate professionals will make every day of your home staging career more enjoyable.
Final Thoughts on Traits of a Home Stager
Home Staging can be a rewarding line of work. Every home stager we have spoken with loves their job. The common thread among those home stagers is that each one has most of the personality traits we discussed in this article.
You don’t need to have every one of these traits to be a successful home stager. Like we said before, most of them can be learned. Since they are needed for everyday job tasks, the more of these traits that you have, the more enjoyable your job will be.
A good home staging certification program (we recommend The Staging Diva) will train you on how to leverage those traits that you have, and how to make up for the traits that you don’t excel.