Home staging consultations are geared towards homeowners who will be living in their homes while it’s on the market, or for vacant homes in need of updates. As a Realtor, you cannot change the location of the home, and the market often dictates your listing price. Your greatest impact is elevating the condition of the property you are listing. Incorporating a home staging consultation into your marketing plan provides you with the best opportunity to maximize the visuals for the home therefore adding value to your listing.
Consultations are one of our most popular services we provide. With 16 years in the business, we have remained consistent with our processes, and our realtors know exactly what to expect at the conclusion of our visit. If you missed our older blog post Consultations: Friend or Foe, I would encourage you to read it here. We provide consultations for up to 400 homes a year. If you do the math, that is roughly 33 homes a month. That means we are working with more sellers in one month than most active real estate agents sell in a year. Think about that…
What makes our process so successful? In the early days of the business, we developed our “Consultation Credo” which follows four “C’s”. These four C’s allow us to train new staff to have the same consistent delivery of information and it is the main reason why our agents continue to include our consultations as part of their real estate services to their clients.
Consistency
We are able to give very detailed information regarding improvements, deferred maintenance and furniture placement for the entire interior as well as the exterior of the home. With this vast amount of information, we are then able to break it down into priority levels for the homeowner. We also provide shoppable links to any update suggestion we may recommend. AND we do all this while generating a full report to give to the client before ever leaving their house.
Creativity
We utilize our design background and staging skills to make beautiful spaces. However, we walk into situations that are either not ideal or highly emotional, that require us to be incredibly creative in our personal approach and method of delivery of the information. We also have become truly creative in how we address and solve some of these challenges these listing present. In many ways, each house is a large puzzle. We are essentially re-arranging it in one sense, and then putting it all back together…. all within a two-hour window.
Customer Service
Customer service doesn’t just mean we walk into a house with a big smile on our face. It’s really understanding WHY a homeowner is selling their house and what challenges they must address as part of the move. We then immediately adjust our approach and our language to meet that need of the seller. Our agents rely on us to be the mouthpiece to deliver the, sometimes, hard news that is difficult for a seller to hear about their home. We try to appeal to each individual to ensure that message is presented in the way they need to hear it. It’s not about us, the home stager, or even about the seller, but it IS about the person who is most likely to buy the home. We recognize that the seller is the one who needs to gain buy-in from us to be affective in carrying out the staging plan.
Contemporary
We must remain current with trends in all of our recommendations. We are in tune with what’s coming in real estate and design so that we can share that to the client. It’s important that the delivery of the information, via our proprietary system, reflect our brand and our agents with professionalism and ease of execution. We want to “W.O.W” our clients. For us, “W.O.W.” stands for “Win over Whyners”. Winning over the people that ask “why” through understanding and explanation, helps us to gain their buy-in to the process and improve the end result. In addition, we offer a client portal with styling tips and videos to continue to help our sellers even after the consultation has taken place. We even check in with them after the consultation to check in on their process.
These “Four Cs” have given our business uniformity in our home staging consultation process. This is why for the past 16 years we have worked with thousands of sellers and agents to give them added value to their homes, as well as maximum results in the sale of their home. If you are a real estate agent, consider incorporating home staging consultations into your services offered. If you are in the Northern Virginia area, we would be happy to partner with you. Book online now to schedule a consultation.
Let us shine a spotlight on your listing!