Home Staging Contracts: 3 Ways to Protect Your Staging Business

Home staging contracts or work agreements aren’t very sexy to discuss, but are crucial to have in your business. I get asked a lot about how to make sure staging clients pay on time, what happens if XYZ, etc., but, ultimately, it’s your home staging contract that should cover all your bases and ensure you are well-protected.

I want to preface this post by saying that I am not a lawyer; you should be getting legal advice specific to your situation from a lawyer. What I am sharing here comes from my personal experiences. It is up to you to double-check it with a lawyer. The regulations in each state are also different, so check with your local small business attorney when you have questions.

There are many sample contracts you can download from the internet, but you should still walk through it with a lawyer to tailor it to your home staging business. Your business is your livelihood, so you best make sure you are covered. In addition, you  are working with large-ticket items here — a house is not a pair of socks from Target. Liability is much higher than in a lot of other businesses. So it is important to make sure you have a clear home staging contract that protects your livelihood and business.

I view a staging contract as a communication tool between you and your clients. A good home staging contract outlines:

• the scope of the work that you will perform,

• what your fee includes, and

• how you work (payment terms, professional policies, insurance, photography waivers, etc.)

Think of your contract as a raincoat. There may be loopholes, and you may get wet, but it will protect you from most of the crap that’s going to rain on you.

Here are my top three tips on exactly how to use a home staging contract to protect yourself and your business:

1. GET A SIGNED CONTRACT BACK BEFORE STAGING STARTS

I’ve been single for a long time, and I found that before anyone gets a date, I have all the power. It’s the same with staging client relationships. You have something the client wants: the ability to stage their property on time, by a certain date. Before you stage a house, you have all the power. After you stage a house, you lose that power. Once you finish a home staging project, it will be near impossible to get a staging contract signed, and you may spend most of your time chasing after that payment.

We learned this the hard way last year in our business when we got crazy busy. Now, no jobs go on the work calendar unless and until we had received both a signed staging agreement and deposit payment. Our Project Coordinator is very firm about this.

No signature, no payment, no job.

We haven’t had issues since implementing this simple process.

2. THE BEST CRISIS MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUE IS TO PREVENT THE CRISIS

In my years of business, I found that one of the best ways to resolve most issues is to be preventative. For example, even though we say in our staging contracts that it is the client’s responsibility to notify us for destaging, and that the client is responsible for prop rental until the day of removal, we still remind clients before they approach their deadline.

We like to give our clients the benefit of the doubt.

Often, they may get too busy and simply forgot all about it. Selling a home tends to be a hectic time of life! By having a reminder — a 30-second email that you’ve copied and pasted from a template — may save you hours of going back and forth for what clients see as an unpleasant surprise. This is something we have set up in our project management program 17hats, and it helps to prevent any miscommunication.

3. USE YOUR STAGING CONTRACT TO PROTECT AGAINST LATE PAYMENT (OR CLIENTS THAT GHOST YOU)