It’s only been about 6 weeks since the baby was born, and despite the fact that she’s working 20 hours a day as an amazing mother, my wife is typically happiest when she’s juggling multiple challenges simultaneously. So, in addition to being an amazing mom 20 hours a day, she’s also looking to do a little work as well. While she very much enjoys working with me flipping houses, at heart she is a designer, and there really isn’t much creative challenge in flipping low-end houses.
So, she has decided that she’s officially going to kick off a Home Staging business, geared mostly towards investors, but also working with other property sellers. Her business model is going to be slightly different than most home stagers, as she only plans to charge clients when their house sells…if their house doesn’t sell, she doesn’t get paid. And her fee will be a percentage of the sale price of the house, which will allow her to get better compensated for the larger projects that required more furniture, most time, and more of a custom design.
As I mentioned, she plans to focus the bulk of her marketing efforts on investors; with so many investors looking to sell off their inventory these days, there are a lot of investor-owned vacant houses that would be well-served to be staged and marketed by someone who understands buyer psychology. She will also provide other target marketing services to her clients, many of which have been used to successfully sell our houses over the past 18 months.
While this web-site is mostly focused on rehabbing/flipping houses, I’ve used this blog to document all aspects of our business; therefore, I will cover a good bit of the staging work that my wife is doing as well, even though it may not be directly related to our own property investments.
And, if you’re selling property in the Atlanta area, and are looking for a great home stager, drop me an email…
Looking forward to hearing more about her business. What a great way to also network your side of it with other investors. Truly a win-win. Nicely done!
Continue to expand on your businesses. Always great to read your posts and updates.
Great strategic thinking from the two of you as always! I’m sure it will be a great success as your wife does phenomenal work!
Wish I could import her work to Denver. She has a real eye for the business.
Way to go Carol! I know you’ll be awesome. Let me know when you clone yourself in NJ 🙂
Oh…. Though it sounds like a good thing to do, I would highly vote against it. Tried it a few years ago and will never do it again. She must have a rock solid contract with legal back-up and her own insurance. Has she taken any staging training courses that deal with the business side as well as the staging side? We are staging for several investment groups in California and though that thought has crossed my mind… it really can be a bad business endeavor that I am not willing to do again. We work with several investment groups out here in CA. Best of luck, Lori Kim.
Hi Lori –
What part do you think is a bad idea?
Running a staging business is just like any other business…of course you need solid contracts, insurance, strong business practices, etc. Without these things, most any serious business venture will fail.
In fact, I remember being told the same thing when I decided to get into flipping houses. People told me that dealing with contractors would be a nightmare without strong contracts, renovating houses would be risky without proper insurance, and managing multiple rehabs simultaneously would be impossible with strong business sense. And you know what…they were right! Luckily, we take our business efforts seriously, and we make sure that all our T’s are crossed and all our I’s are dotted…it’s the only way to run a serious business.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting your comment, but given the fact that there are several large staging companies in our area, I have to assume that it’s not a bad business to be in…