December 14, 2007
272.8 miles later…
Last Friday was a bit crazy, 3 consultations and spending 2 hours each way driving to Roseville for the Stager’s Round Table, I totally collapsed by the time I got home. I took a “nap” at 6pm and woke up at 3am next to a cold burrito that my sister was kind enough to buy me for dinner.
But it was SO SO SO cool to meet fellow stagers who believe in propelling the staging industry forward. People cared enough to take time off to show up and discuss what are important concerns in the industry: such as inconsistency in the staging education, what qualifies someone to be a stager, how to deal with longevity in the industry and establishing legitimacy in the real estate industry as a whole. It was also great to finally put people to the photos that I have been seeing on Active Rain, a myspace-like online community for the real estate industry. I especially loved seeing my old friend and fellow stager in Chicago, Craig Schiller, who has went above and beyond to try to unify the industry through the Stage It Forward forum.
This industry is still so young, so am my career in the industry. Even within my own business, I have made mistakes. I have consistently been trying to find what works and how to minimize any possible “bumps” in the road for the clients. Like today I figured out Google checkout is a total bust, and I decided to seek other more trustworthy credit card processing companies. Anyway…
A lot of us at the Round Table agreed that there are a lot of fluctuations among the industry such as influxes of new stagers swarming the markets who don’t know how to run business properly, or internal division of the industry of whose designation is better than one another. Ultimately, these issues hurt the consumers, and in the long run, that means they will hurt the industry because of the mis-trust created between potential clients & the actual working staging professionals. But forums like these are great opportunities for us stagers who are serious about our businesses and from diverse backgrounds to unite together and push for the betterment of the industry. That, ladies and gentlemen, is incredibly exciting!
Other than Craig’s efforts with Stage It Forward, there are also RESA, Real Estate Staging Association that is trying to bridge some of these inconsistencies and divisions. RESA takes stagers from all walks of the life and am trying to push the education efforts to have all the training companies to agree on a standard so that the new stagers won’t take a cheap staging-in-a-box education and have no clue how to conduct business or even take out insurance to protect their business interests. (You think I am kidding about this? I get calls all the time from new stagers: “Um, how do you charge your clients?” You can read about my previous post How A Stager Can Kill Your Deal by clicking on this link.)
I personally have been trying to push for Carnival of Real Estate Home Staging. The blog carnival is something that I think can be a useful forum as well, just like what Carnival of Real Estate does for the real estate community. Moreover, this carnival is not only for the stagers, but for EVERYONE, even if their views toward staging is negative. I want to create a conversation: not only want to hear from other real estate professionals like home inspectors, realtors, etc., I also want to hear from the SELLERS, and general consumers! I have been trying to grow it and recently created a web community for it at corehs.info. Feel free to join and submit posts for the Carnival, I would love to hear your voice!
Together, let’s stage it forward!
Cheers,
Cindy
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