The Listing Prep Almanac

What actually happens in a paid staging consultation

A seller who has just booked a staging consultation is buying two hours of somebody walking around her house, followed by a document. Asking what that actually gets her is a reasonable question, and most stagers answer it badly because the work is so obvious from the inside.

So here is the whole thing, from the booking call to the plan that arrives afterwards.

Before anyone knocks

The booking call settles scope, and scope is what people argue about later. Is this advice only, or advice plus a working day where the stager moves furniture herself? Who is going to be there, the seller, the agent, or both? Is anyone else in the household going to disagree with every decision made that morning, and should they be present rather than told afterwards?

A stager will usually ask when the listing goes live and when photos are booked. That date reorders everything. Advice for a seller with five weekends is a different document from advice for a seller with four days, because the four-day version has to cut anything that involves a tradesperson or a drying time.

The walkthrough

She is looking at each room through two frames, and almost all of the advice comes from them.

The first is the camera. Listing photos are shot from a small number of positions, usually the doorway and one corner, and anything outside those frames barely exists to a buyer scrolling on a phone.

The second is the doorway pause. A stranger standing in the entrance of a room forms an impression in a few seconds, and whatever her eye lands on first is what she remembers. If that is a cable, the room is about the cable.

Inside each room, the specific things being catalogued are ordinary: what is on every horizontal surface, what is on the walls, where the light comes from and at what hour, whether the furniture blocks the natural walking path, and what is in the frame the camera is going to take.

Room by room, roughly what comes out of it

The front of the house and the entry. This is the first listing photo and the first thirty seconds of every showing. Door colour and hardware, what is stored on the porch, what is visible from the street, and what greets someone the moment the door opens.

The kitchen. Counters cleared down to a deliberate few items rather than emptied to nothing. What comes off the fridge doors. Which small appliances live out and which go into a cupboard for six weeks. Cabinet hardware, if it is dating the room.

The living room. Seating pulled off the walls into an actual conversation. One focal point rather than three competing ones. Rug size, which is the single most common miss. Cords. And the television, which is its own negotiation.

Dining. Chairs counted and matched. Table either properly set or completely clear, never half. Light fixture height above the table.

The primary bedroom. Bedding, matching lamps on both sides, what leaves the nightstands entirely, and closets thinned until the shelves show air. Buyers open closets, and a closet reads as capacity.

Bathrooms. Everything personal off the counter and into a bin you can carry. Fresh towels reserved for showings. The shower curtain, which is usually the oldest item in the room. Lids down.

Basement, laundry, garage, storage. These are scanned rather than admired, and what is being scanned is whether the buyer's own things would fit.

Paint comes up in most rooms, and a good plan names colours rather than saying "something neutral", because "something neutral" sends a seller to a paint store to make a decision she is not equipped to make.

What a staging consultation is not

It covers appearance and presentation. That is the whole scope.

Pricing the listing belongs to the agent. Anything that is not cosmetic belongs to a trade. A stager who starts giving opinions past the decorating line has stepped into somebody else's licence, and the good ones say so plainly in the room rather than guessing to seem helpful.

What you receive at the end

The document is the deliverable, and it should arrive within a day or two rather than being scribbled on the spot.

A usable plan has a few properties:

• It is organised room by room, in the order the rooms should be tackled, so a seller with two free weekends knows where to start.
• Actions are sorted by effort, so the twenty-minute jobs are visibly separate from the ones that take a day or need help.
• It includes photos of the specific things it refers to. A note without a picture becomes a disagreement later. A note with a picture is just a fact.
• It names what is already working in each room. A list of nothing but problems is demoralising and gets abandoned by Sunday.
• It separates what the stager will bring from what the seller supplies, so nobody is surprised on install day.
• It states clearly which parts are advice included in the fee and which are a separate quoted job.

The document matters more than the walkthrough, which is counterintuitive until you have done a few. A seller remembers maybe a third of what is said in her own kitchen, because she is defending her house while trying to listen. The plan is what she works from once the stager has left and the defensiveness has worn off. It is also what the agent forwards to the next seller, which is how stagers get their next job.

After the plan

Most sellers work the list themselves and stop there. Some book the stager back for a styling day, or for a full staging term if the house is vacant. Either is a separate engagement with its own quote, and a consultation that quietly turns into a sales pitch for one is a consultation the seller will resent paying for.

If you are the stager rather than the seller, our staging consultation checklist is the same walkthrough written from your side, with the room order and the note structure. And if you are the seller and you have not chosen anyone yet, our directory of Canadian staging companies lists who works in each city, Vancouver included, built from each company's own website.

Whichever side of it you are on, the test of a consultation is simple. Two weeks later, can somebody still tell what to do next by reading the page?