charged 400 for a staging consult with no furniture. sold in 12 days.

I've been poking at the service side for a while and kept getting stuck on the same wall: staging means owning furniture, owning furniture means a warehouse, and I have neither.

So I tried the version that skips it. A friend of a friend was listing an owner-occupied three bed and couldn't afford a full stage. I offered a consultation. Two hours walking the house with them, then a written room-by-room list of what to remove, what to move, what to buy under 50 dollars, and where to put their own things. 400 flat.

What that actually looked like: 31 line items. Take down 60 percent of the family photos. Move the recliner out of the living room into the garage. Two lamps in the back bedroom because the overhead was the only light source. Clear everything off the kitchen counters except one thing. Replace the shower curtain. Buy a white duvet cover for the primary, which was the single largest expense on the list at 44 dollars.

They did about 26 of the 31 items. Photos came back looking like a different house. Listed and had an accepted offer in 12 days at 3k over ask.

Nearly broke it: they wanted to keep a large glass cabinet in the dining room and I let it go rather than fight, and it's in every dining photo. It's fine. I'd fight harder next time.

What I'd keep: the written list. They referred me to two people specifically because they could hand somebody the document. My time in was about six hours including writing it up. No inventory, no truck, no insurance question yet.

Answer

1brandonlee36Passive

The written list is the whole business and you found it by accident. Consultation-only work has no inventory cost, no delivery cost, and no damage exposure, which means your margin is your hourly rate and nothing else eats it. Six hours for 400 is about 67 an hour, and that goes up fast once you've written twenty of these and the template does half the work.

Where it caps out: you can't scale it past your own calendar, and the fee is small enough that you need volume or referrals from agents who list steadily. The agents are the customer, not the sellers. A seller uses you once. An agent who lists 20 houses a year and wants every one of them to show well can send you a dozen.

One thing to sort out before you take money from strangers rather than friends of friends. Whether a paid opinion about preparing a property for sale touches your state's real estate licensing rules depends on the state and on how the service is described, and some states are stricter about anything adjacent to marketing a property than others. Ask a licensed professional in your state before you put a price list on a website. Cheap question to ask now, expensive one later.

5 replies

1megan_doyle15 Get yours

31 items is way more specific than I pictured a consultation being. Do you write it during the walkthrough or after?

1tylerbrooks9PassivePRO5

This is the version of staging I'd actually pay for as a seller. I don't want a stranger's sofa in my living room, I want somebody to tell me my house looks cluttered in a way I can't see anymore.

1angela_burkeServicePRO6

We sell this as a 350 walkthrough and it feeds the full-stage business. Maybe one in five consultation clients calls back and says just do it, and then they're a 3,000 job. Price it low enough that saying yes is easy and treat it as the front door. @thicket is right that the agents are where the repeat volume lives, and the way in is doing one for free for an agent who has a hard listing.

1ryanmck27SC2C

The glass cabinet thing will keep happening. Sellers have one object they won't move and it's always in the best room.