Home Staging. Designs. Life.

In today’s competitive market, it’s important as a home seller to find cost effective ways to add value to your home and make it stand out to home shoppers.  Many sellers will take time to research their real estate agents with great detail.  When building your team of home selling professionals, shopping for and hiring a stager for your home is just as important.

If you run a search on Craigslist for “staging” under real estate services, several pages worth of stagers pop out.  All of them promise to sell your home faster and for more. Good or bad, how do you know? Do you dare to use your equity to gamble on a stager you randomly found on the web?

Here are 5 tips to important tips when on how to hire a qualified stager:

1.  Ask for qualifications. But don’t mistake this with the letters behind this person’s name on his/her business card as qualifications. When I was working as a Realtor, although I had passed my exams, it didn’t mean anything until I was out on the field.

Qualifications = how much work has this person done in the staging industry?

 Ask to see resume, portfolio, past before & after pictures and certifications and continue education if this is important to you.  Ask questions about their work when reviewing their portfolio to generate a conversation about how they might work for you.  A nice starter can be, “Oh, tell me about the story behind this picture!”)

2.   Ask for their professional policies. As a professional, for example, if you are a bank teller, there are certain procedures to follow when a customer shows up at your window with a wad of cash in their hands, right? If a customer is doing something inappropriate, such as depositing someone else’s check into his/her account, there are certain protocols to follow, correct? Similarly with running a small business, which most of the stagers are. You want to do business with someone who has strong ethics and professional policies because this reflects their professionalism. When your potential stager comes over for a consultation (many>>> Read more on Staged4more's blog!

Note:  Staged4more is an eco-friendly company and we believe in recycling everything, including blogposts.  This is the first in a weekly series of refreshed posts we’re calling “Restyled” from our earlier blogging years.  This post was originally written in October, 2006 and has been “Restyled” for your reading pleasure.  Let us know what you think!