Home Staging Pricing Strategy: Charge What You're Worth

Pricing home staging shouldn’t feel like throwing darts in the dark. We open the books on how to move from guesswork to a grounded, repeatable system that protects your profit and elevates your value. If you’ve ever underbid a project, overworked to save a contract, or panicked when a client balked at your quote, this conversation will reset how you price and how you sell.

If you’re ready to quote with confidence, defend your number without blinking, and make money on every install, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a stager friend, and leave a review telling us the one pricing change you’ll make this week!

Transcript

Why Pricing Feels Hard

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I can't tell you how many times I've heard stagers say, I don't know if I'm pricing my services right. If you've said that before, you're not alone, but there's a better way to do it. And when clients push back on price, it's rarely actually about the number. More times than not, it's them not understanding the value of what you're truly providing. Today I want to deep dive into the topic that is always top in mind, and that is pricing. My hope and my goal is by the end of this video that you'll have clarity in how to price your services correctly and can communicate the value that they provide. If you've ever been that person that's pitched a job and priced yourself too low, you know, and you felt the pain that a project actually costs you money instead of making you money. And likewise, the opposite is true. If you price something too high, there's this terrifying feeling that maybe the client's gonna say no or think that you're overpriced and you lose the job. And so there's this dangerous space of too cheap and too expensive, and pricing yourself somewhere in the middle is the name of the game. But how do you know what that middle number really should be? I'm gonna tell you that that answer is gonna be different for every single business. And we'll dive into some of the metrics and the things you need to think about as you're building and pricing out your own business. To put this into perspective, a friend of mine got together with a handful of other home stagers in her state. They all sat down and pulled up an example home. And they said, I want everybody in the room to price out how much it would cost to stage the primary bedroom, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, you know those focal spaces. And they all anonymously submit their quotes. But something very interesting happened. When they got the results together, do you know what they found? That same property that every one of them bid out ranged from anywhere from$2,000 to$11,000 for the same exact project scope. Now, are they all offering and delivering the same exact service? No, probably not. Is their furniture and their design and experience all the same? Absolutely not. But should there be that much of a discrepancy in the pricing game? Absolutely not. And so what that says to me is that we have a lot of individuals in the industry that are just picking numbers out of the sky or looking at what their competition does and decide to go a little bit lower. Rather than truly understanding the costs in their business and pricing appropriately to cover what they need to cover to be successful as a business owner, but also factoring in the value that they're delivering to their clients and making sure that that price reflects both of those aspects. Your pricing should include more than just your team's time going and doing the installation and the furniture that's going into the home. That price needs to include the design time that's happening behind the scenes. That price needs to include the drive time for you and your team and your movers to get to and from jobs, not just on the installation, but also on the D stage. Your price needs to reflect the cost of you to store every one of those pieces of furniture that you do own in your warehouse behind the scenes and the insurance that goes with them and their utilities. Your price needs to reflect all of these different elements, but also needs to reflect your expertise. And so when you're really deciding how much you need to charge for a project, make sure that you're not just factoring in labor time directly for that. There needs to be a buffer of overhead to absorb the cost of your business and the cost of you actually doing the business and performing the work. I find that most stagers price off of two different models. One of them is a percentage of the property. So let's say that you are listing a million-dollar property and you go in and stage the whole thing. Maybe they say that the staging costs 2% of the value of the home. So they're gonna charge you$20,000 for that. Now, this can be a really easy approach for staging pricing because your clients always know how much it's gonna cost to stage a property. The challenge around that is that if I have a really expensive house that just happens to be in downtown and is a very small project scope, we're in this new scenario where we are overcharging for the service we're delivering. But in reverse, if I have a fairly affordable home that is in a rural area and is 7,000 square feet, but because it's out in the country, it's cheap as can be. Now you're in a scenario where it's probably losing money taking on a job like that. And so pricing based on the sale value of a home can be a little bit dangerous at times where you're almost gambling and saying, some of these I'm gonna make money, some of these I'm not. For me personally, I want to make money on every single job I do so that there is consistency and I know that I'm being successful and responsible as a business owner. The second type of pricing model comes around project scope. It's having a conversation with the client and determining a price based on the rooms that you're staging, and that's really a reflection of the amount of furniture you're bringing into a home. This gives you as a business owner so much more control over what you're actually doing, how long it's gonna take you and your team to complete a project, and the amount of furniture that's going into a property. I recommend taking an approach like this as your pricing because it gives a true reflection of the actual work being completed. I'm spewing off all of these random recommendations and things that I've learned, but it's not because I walked in the door and knew all of the answers. The reality is I made my own fair share of stupid mistakes. The very first project that I ever staged, I remember walking into the gentleman's home. We talked about his project scope. It was gonna be an occupied home. So he wanted me to come in and just sort of freshen up a few things, buy a few supplemental pieces to make his home beautiful. And I sat down and I remember thinking, it's probably gonna take me maybe four to six hours while I'm here. This isn't gonna be that bad. I'm excited to take the project on. And I just wanted somebody to say yes to me. And so I looked him in the eyes and I said, Great, it's gonna be$850. And I had the biggest smile. He looked at me shocked and he said, Somebody else was in here yesterday and they asked for more than double what you're asking for. And I thought to myself, that's crazy. How could a stager ever charge that much for the services that they're providing? Well, little did I know just how naive I was because I walked away, I landed that contract like I wanted to, and I spent 20 hours behind the scenes buying the products that I needed to for his home, sourcing all of the items, loading them into the vehicles that I needed to. And when I finally was ready for the install, I showed up to his home and it was a mess. Nothing was cleaned. There was dirty laundry and clean laundry, all sitting on the beds. There was too much furniture in the home. And I rolled up my sleeves and I said, I'm gonna get this done. And I spent eight hours in the home that day, perfecting every little thing, cleaning up after the homeowners, moving heavy pieces of furniture into their garage because they had no business being in the home, and dripping in sweat as I finished up the project. The homeowner walked in and was amazed and so impressed. He was thrilled with the work I did and said it felt like a it came out of a magazine and I was beaming. But do you know the one thing I thought when I got in the car as I left? I nailed the project, I nailed that contract, and all I could think is I think when I do the math, I made less than$10 an hour. That was a really stupid mistake. And that right there is an important lesson that I learned very early on is make sure that you really understand the time that goes into every project. Because oftentimes it's so much more than what you realize. It's more than just the hours you're spending in the home. It's the thinking, the planning, the sourcing, the expertise. And so factoring and understanding how long it really takes you and your team to complete a job is a huge part of pricing. The other thing I want to touch on today, outside of just pricing, is value. I find oftentimes in this industry, everyone is afraid to be more expensive than their competition. So I thought this would be a good time to share a story of another scenario we recently ran into this year. We got a phone call this year from a real estate agent, and they said, Hey, listen, I made a mistake. We'd never spoken with them before. It was a very unique way to start a conversation, but we leaned in and listened. And they said, I have this high-end luxury listing that I put on the market, and I wanted to save money, so I went with a cheaper staging company. Not gonna name who, but we did it. And we opened up a broker's open. For those of you that aren't familiar with that, it's basically an exclusive party for real estate agents to come and view a property before it actually goes on the market. So they have the inside scoop on what to tell their clients. And they said when they were at that party, not two, but three real estate agents came up to them and said, You made a really big mistake. The furniture and the staging is not doing justice to the property. You need to call Linden Creek. Now, when you think about the value of staging and when you think about your pricing, saying that you're gonna be the cheapest or that your price is competitive with everything else is not the answer. The answer is conveying value in the product that you deliver. And if that value is matching the needs of your clients, then you are priced appropriately. Understanding your value and what you provide is crucial for setting you and your clients up for success. One final note I want to leave you with is some interesting insight that I actually just heard this morning. It's around sales conversions. There was a podcast I was listening to called The Game by Alex Hermosy. And what he said is if 85% of your clients are saying yes to you when you're offering a service, that right there is an indicator that you are priced too low and you should raise your prices. If your 60% of the people you're talking to say yes, I'm going to move forward with your services, the answer still holds true. You're probably priced too low. So don't be afraid of people saying no. People should be saying no to your services. They might not be the right fit, but if every single person you talk to is saying yes, it's a really good indicator and red flag for you to maybe re-evaluate your prices after all and make sure you're sitting where you need to in the market. Pricing isn't about guessing, it's about understanding your costs and it's about communicating your value. Whether you're a new or seasoned home stager, what part of pricing are you still working through and trying to figure out? Let me know in the comments down below. Thanks for listening to this video today. I hope that it added value to your business. Don't forget to like and subscribe. This is In Good Space.