"I don't need a home stager, I can do it myself"

As a professional Home Stager, you will run into potential clients who tell you they don't need help. "After all," the homeowner says, "how hard can it be to get rid of clutter, clean the house and buy some flowers?"

Of course, that's not all a Home Stager or House Fluffer does. Plus, a professional Home Stager brings an objective eye that few homeowners have when contemplating their own beloved possessions!

I'd been getting various emails from Sandy who was trying to decide whether she needed my help. She told me she had already visited my site, www.sixelements.com and used my Free House Fluffing Tips to help prepare her own home for sale.

She proudly reported that she had used my tips and put extra furniture and clutter into storage, and that the house really looked great. She wasn't sure whether she should spend money having me come over for a Home Staging Consultation just to make sure everything looked as good as it could.

I should mention at this point that Sandy was about to put a $789,000 house on the market, so a few hundred dollars for a consultation was not beyond her financial reach!

I explained that my Home Staging By Design clients earn a minimum of $10,000 more when they sell their homes, some as high as $70,000 and $100,000 more. So, she could look at my fee as an investment with a potentially significant return. I also said that I had yet to see a house where I didn't have several ideas for how it could be transformed. And this is equally true of homes that others with less experience would say "showed well."

I don't believe in begging a potential client to hire me or giving them a "hard sell." I know what I do can literally change their life by giving them a cash windfall they never would have anticipated and I explain why. When you are selling a service, it's critical that you know the value of your time, otherwise you will never earn what you are worth. I talk a lot about pricing strategies in the Staging Diva course "The Business of Home Staging: What you need to start and how to grow."

Sandy called me back after a two weeks of doing her best to get her own house ready for sale. She decided to invest in two hours of my time to make sure she had done everything needed before putting her house on the market. Boy, was she in for a shock after I walked through her house!

I believe in being candid with a client, after all they are paying me for my honest opinion. I said, "from what you've told me you have obviously been busy and put much effort into getting your home ready. But, if you really want your house to sell for over three quarters of a million dollars, it has to look the part. Right now it doesn't look anywhere near the price range you're hoping for. Let me show you what I mean..."

From there I went through every room in detail and pointed out all the places she had obviously tried to save money. For example, her husband had painted the entire house stark white, dripping paint all over the wood trim, and skipping the second coat where clearly it was needed. Clearly it was an amateur paint job which might be fine in a $150,000 house but not when you're hoping for $789,000!

My recommendations included:

• fixing up the sloppy paint (I wanted to get away from stark white and select a warm but neutral color palette for their entire home, but they didn't consider this an option)
• minor repairs
• replacing bargain basement light fixtures
• eliminating at least 50% more of the contents (imagine how much stuff they must have had when they started!)
• rearranging the remaining furnishings
• purchasing some accessories
• adding flowers
• new paint color for the front door and porch and adding planted urns for curb appeal

Often I do all this work for my clients but there are always those who want to pay for my advice and then do the work themselves. This usually costs them more money in the long run, but they don't realize this until it's too late and they don't get the selling price they had hoped for!

If you're at all nervous about how to do a home staging consultation, I outline the whole process in detail in the Staging Diva Home Staging Checklist. It's the guide I follow with hundreds of clients for Six Elements Inc.

Here's what Sandy told me two weeks after my visit:

Thanks so much for your advice and honesty during our meeting. Your recommendations were a tremendous help, I only wish I had called you in a month sooner. I wasted so much time and made many wrong decisions because I couldn't be objective and I've never sold a house before. Who knows, my house might have already been sold by now and here I am not even on the market yet!

So, the next time a potential client says, "I can do it myself," point out the potential pitfalls and how you can help them get the most money for their home quickly.