How to build a million dollar home staging company
Melissa Marro, owner of Rave Home Staging—a million dollar home staging company—delivered a keynote speech at this year’s International Association of Home Staging Professionals (IAHSP) Conference. Reflecting on her company’s rise in the industry, Melissa shared how she has launched not one, but two successful home staging companies in her lifetime.
She was forced to sell her first staging company, located in Charleston, due to changes in health and location. But she picked right back up where she left off when she moved to Jacksonville, founding Rave and setting the stage for excellence in home staging. Six years later, Rave is a million dollar company, and Melissa is internationally recognized in the home staging community.
Rave stages over 500 vacant homes every year, plus the business we have coming in from our occupied stages. On average, we complete 2 stages and 2 de-stages EVERY DAY, Monday through Friday.
How do we do it?
Never give a bid
We base our prices off of the list price of the house, so our clients always know exactly what price tag to expect. We NEVER have to give a bid. And we supply copies of our staging contracts to the realtors we work with, so when they meet up with a seller, they can sign up for our staging services right then and there.
Ditch the pretty talk
You need to tell a unique story, otherwise, why wouldn’t your clients go with a cheaper stager? A lot of stagers talk “pretty.” But we don’t make houses pretty, we make them marketable. THAT is the story we tell our clients.
We base our staging on data—demographics, psychographics, architecture, everything that will determine who walks through that door as a potential buyer.
Welcome the competition
We like to use educational marketing. Basically, we tell you everything we do that makes us successful stagers and encourage you to do it too.
Why?
We’re not worried about competitors stealing our model. Most people don’t implement all or even most of the systems we suggest to them. But even if they did, guess what—that’s a good thing for us. It means the whole industry is improving, and that makes all home stagers look better. As our industry gains respect and recognition, so do we.
Work the system
The systems work for you when you work the systems. We use broker open houses to seal the deal on many of our higher-end homes. But we don’t stop there. We get sponsors in exchange for access to the brokers. We update all of the brokers who attend on how well the house sold and stay top of mind with all of these new contacts. Now, we’ve sold a great house, shown a lot of people who we are and how well we stage, and didn’t even have to pay for it all ourselves.
All of this just scratches the surface of what we do at Rave.
To learn more, watch Melissa’s full keynote on Youtube and view our educational materials and class dates on our website. Download the copy/paste materials mentioned in the video by visiting stagingoneders.com.
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