For years, home stagers have been taught how to communicate the value of home staging. We learn to explain why staging works, why sellers should invest in it and what it contributes to the sale of a home. But there’s another question I don’t think we’ve spent nearly enough time answering: Why should a client choose your staging company to provide it?
That question matters. As someone who’s spent 20+ years in the staging industry, who built a multi-six-figure staging business that became one of the top staging brands in Canada, it’s a question I ask my clients at the start of every project. Why? Because when clients have several staging companies to choose from, being able to prove staging is valuable doesn’t necessarily give someone a reason to believe your company is worth more than the stager down the street.
I’m working with a home stager right now who has more than 20 years of experience in this industry. She built a successful company, grew it to around $500,000 a year and sustained that revenue for eight years.
Like so many stagers, she built her business the way many of us were taught to build one. She became good at staging, at marketing to Realtors, and built relationships based on the services she offered. She educated clients on the value of home staging.
And it worked.
Until it didn’t.
Around year ten, a couple of new staging companies entered her market offering similar services at lower prices. Agents who had worked with her for years started going elsewhere. Her revenue didn’t just dip. It collapsed.
She lowered her prices to compete. Eventually, she was barely covering her bills. A few years later, she closed the company.
Here’s what I find so interesting about her story. Her staging didn’t suddenly get worse. She didn’t lose two decades of experience. She didn’t stop being good at what she did.
What changed was the market around her. Clients had more staging companies to choose from, and when they couldn’t see enough difference between those companies, price became one of the easiest ways to compare them.
That’s why I think we need to separate two things the staging industry has spent years treating as though they are the same.
The value of home staging isn’t your value.
We’ve Spent Years Proving the Value of Home Staging
When I started my staging company, Rooms in Bloom, home staging was still a relatively new concept in my market. A big part of marketing my business was simply educating people about what home staging was and why they should invest in it.
And that was what we were taught to do.
I talked about how staging helped buyers visualize themselves living in a home. I explained how it could help a listing stand out. We shared before-and-afters and statistics. I talked about return on investment and why spending money to prepare a property for sale made sense.
I did all of that because it helped people understand why home staging mattered for them.
And at the time, it made sense because we were marketing a service that many people didn’t fully understand yet. Realtors weren’t necessarily accustomed to recommending staging to their clients. Homeowners didn’t always understand why they should pay someone to bring furniture into a vacant home or rearrange the furniture they already owned.
Before I could convince someone to hire our staging company, I often had to convince them that staging itself was worth paying for.
The problem is that home staging is much more widely understood now. Realtors know what it can do for their listings. Home sellers, for the most part, understand why it’s important for the successful sale of their home. HGTV and other TV networks have done a lot of the work in explaining the value of staging so people get it.
The staging industry, however, hasn’t kept up. And neither has a lot of the advice given to stagers starting and running their businesses.
Today, there are markets with five, ten, fifteen or more staging companies competing for the same agents and listings. Many Realtors have worked with multiple stagers. They already understand what staging is and why sellers invest in it.
Yet I still see stagers being told to market themselves by explaining the value of home staging.
- Share more before-and-afters.
- Talk about why staging works.
- Explain the return on investment.
- Show clients why professional staging is worth paying for.
But if every staging company in your market can make the same argument, none of that tells the client why they should choose you.
Your Clients Are Asking a Different Question Now
This is the distinction I don’t think we’ve spent enough time talking about as an industry:
The value of home staging answers, “Why should I stage this property?” Your value answers, “Why should I hire you to do it?”
Those are completely different questions.
A staging company can tell a Realtor that staging creates an emotional connection with buyers. Another staging company can say the same thing.
You can explain how staging helps a listing make a stronger first impression online. So can your competitor. You can talk about your beautiful inventory, professional service and ability to transform a property.
So can a lot of other good stagers.
That doesn’t mean those things aren’t valuable. It means they don’t necessarily give someone enough information to understand why they should choose your company over another one.
I talked about this recently with Marianne Cherico on her podcast, Home Stagers and Designers on Fire. When we focus primarily on selling the service, it becomes much harder for prospective clients to understand what makes the business providing that service different.
Listen: Stop Blending In. Start Standing Out.
And that difference becomes particularly important when the quotes come in. Because at that point, the client is no longer deciding whether or not they believe in staging. They’ve already decided to stage the property. Now they’re deciding who they’re going to hire to do it.
If every company they’re considering is talking about the same benefits of staging, showing equally beautiful work and offering what appears to be a similar service, they don’t have much to help them understand why one company might be worth more than another.
So what do they have left to compare?
Price.
When Clients Can’t See the Difference, Price Becomes the Difference
Imagine a Realtor is looking at three staging companies.
- All three offer vacant staging.
- All three have beautiful portfolios.
- All three have professional websites.
- All three promise excellent service.
One quote comes in at $3,800. Another is $4,200. Yours is $4,900. If the Realtor doesn’t understand much else about the difference between those businesses, why wouldn’t price become part of the decision?
We sometimes talk about clients who choose the cheaper stager as though they simply didn’t understand our value.
But did we give them enough information to understand it?
More importantly, have we communicated the value of working with us – outside of home staging – so that they’re not just comparing staging quotes? Because that’s the part that’s been missing from the conversation. That’s the part that is the real reason so many stagers feel undervalued.
And it’s because they haven’t been taught how to separate their value from the value of home staging and build their business around that.
I’ve written before about why home stagers end up competing on price, but I think the problem often starts long before the quote lands in someone’s inbox.
I know because I experienced it in my own staging business.
What Changed in My Own Staging Business
Before I improved my own staging business’s positioning and messaging, I regularly had agents come back to me and ask me to lower my price because another company could provide what appeared to be the same service for less.
My response was exactly what I had been taught to do. I tried harder to sell them on staging.
Then, I pulled out the statistics. I explained the investment. I talked about what professional staging could do for their listing and the potential return for their seller.
But eventually I realized something.
The cheaper stager could say all of that too. And probably was.
I didn’t need to get better at proving that staging was valuable. I needed to give agents a reason to value my company specifically. That realization changed the way I built and marketed Rooms in Bloom.
At the time, I repositioned the company around luxury vacant staging. That gave us a much clearer position in our market, but I think there’s an important part of that story that gets missed.
I didn’t just start calling us a luxury staging company.
I started showing up differently.
One of the missing pieces was a lack of understanding about my business and brand. That if I wanted to be chosen or referred even when there were cheaper stagers available, I had to get them to see and trust me as an expert. So part of my strategy was in building the value into my services through my positioning work. The other part was in communicating that value in my marketing.
I began sharing more of my expertise and my point of view. Instead of repeating generic staging information people could find anywhere, I started interpreting what I was seeing in our local market. I talked about the things happening in staging and real estate that mattered to the agents I wanted to work with. And, I became more visible as the person behind the company and gave people a reason to understand how I thought.
I also replaced those generic stats and information with property specific information. Again, this was just another way to demonstrate “why choose me.”
Over time, that built credibility around me and around Rooms in Bloom that had very little to do with whether an agent believed staging worked. They already knew staging worked. What changed was that more of them knew why they wanted us.
Instead of, “Here are a few staging companies you could call,” I wanted the response to become:
“Call her.”
That’s a very different position to hold in a market.
Want to take a closer look at your own staging business?
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Being Good at Staging Isn’t the Same as Being Known for Something
I work with experienced stagers who are exceptionally good at what they do.
They have beautiful portfolios. They’ve invested in great inventory. They provide excellent service. Some have teams, awards, certifications and years of experience behind them.
Then I ask them to separate all of that from the general value of staging and answer a much harder question:
Why you?
That’s where things often get difficult. And I don’t think it’s because they don’t have an answer. I think it’s because many home stagers have never been taught how to find it.
Listen, we’ve spent years getting better at the art of staging. Stagers have invested in inventory, education, systems, processes and client experience. They have accumulated knowledge about homes, buyers, sellers, Realtors and our local real estate markets.
But being excellent at what you do doesn’t automatically mean your market understands what makes your business different.
That’s why standing out as a home stager requires more than simply doing beautiful work and marketing it well. You have to give people something specific to know you for.
Your Value Has to Exist Before You Market It
This is where branding becomes much bigger than a logo, colour palette or Instagram feed.
Listen, I’ll be the first to tell you that those things matter. As someone who develops brands and designs websites, I obviously believe they matter.
But they aren’t where I start.
When I’m working with a stager on her brand, I want to understand what she believes. How she thinks and what she’s learned through her experience. What she is exceptionally good at. And, what kind of experience she wants her clients to have. How the perspective she has cultivated, can be brought into her positioning and what she wants to be known for. What she wants people to associate with her company.
I’m trying to uncover what makes the business valuable to its clients beyond the fact that home staging itself has value.
That’s the substance of the brand development work. Because it involves more than aesthetics. It involves your identity. Your value. Your positioning. Literally, the heart of why you exist and why people should choose you – outside of staging.
The logo comes later.
Once your identity and positioning become clearer, they create context around everything else a prospective client sees.
They give meaning to the way your services are structured. Then they help clients understand your approach. And this gives your expertise somewhere to live. It shapes the experience people have with the company and the reputation you build over time.
And it gives your marketing something meaningful to communicate.
Because marketing doesn’t create your value.
It communicates it.
Give Clients Something Other Than Price to Compare
A strong brand and a clear position won’t mean you never lose another project to a cheaper stager.
You probably will.
There will always be clients who prioritize price, just as there will always be staging companies willing to charge less. But the goal isn’t to eliminate price from every buying decision. The goal is to make sure price isn’t the only meaningful difference a prospective client can see.
When people understand what you’re known for, how you think, where your expertise lies, why your services work the way they do and what kind of experience they can expect from your company, they have more context for your price.
Over time, those things also build something much more valuable than a better sales pitch.
They build a reputation.
That’s how you move from being another staging company someone asks for a quote to becoming the stager people specifically ask for.
So if you’re losing projects to cheaper competitors, struggling to generate referrals or finding yourself constantly having to justify your prices, I wouldn’t start by asking how to market your staging services harder.
I’d start with a different question:
Has your market been given a meaningful reason to value your business separately from the value of home staging itself?
The staging industry has done a good job proving that staging is valuable.
Now we need to get much better at proving why we are.
Build a staging business clients have a reason to choose
If you’ve already proven you can stage but you’re struggling to stand out, losing projects to cheaper competitors or finding it difficult to articulate why clients should choose your company, this is exactly the kind of work we do inside Six-Figure Stager.
We work on the business behind the staging, including how you position it, market it, price your services and build the systems and leadership needed to grow it sustainably.
Learn more about Six-Figure Stager
