How to Find the Best Price Structure for Your Home Staging Services

If you are like every other home stager on the planet, you have wondered at some point if there is a better way to do your pricing. Whether just getting started, or a veteran stager, finding the best price structure for your home staging business is an ongoing process.

There are so many variables to consider with each staging project and, honestly, sometimes coming up with appropriate numbers feels like a shot in the dark.

Here is a great end-of-year exercise to bring clarity. Just follow these simple steps to see if some patterns emerge that will help you streamline your bid creation.

First, put all the jobs you did this year into a spreadsheet. We created one for you, with all of the formulas already in place.

Make 7 columns across the top:

1. Job Address
2. List Price
3. How Much You Charged
4. How Much the Job Cost You to Do*
5. How Much Profit You Made (Your Fees Minus Your Cost)
6. How Many Square Feet
7. How Many Rooms You Staged

Make a second sheet if you do both occupied and vacant staging. One sheet will be occupied homes, and one sheet will be vacant homes.

Now start listing every house you staged this year. It doesn't matter if you staged 5 houses total for the year or 500. We will assume that each initial contract was for the same amount of time.

Exercise 1: Add up the profit column and divide by the number of entries in the column. That's your average profit per job.

Are you happy with the result? It doesn't really matter if you made a little more, or made a little less on each job, but how you are doing on average.

If you're not happy with the average, that's telling you you need to raise your prices. If you are happy, you might consider raising your prices a bit anyway, so that you can increase your profitability.

Were all your expenses met? Were you able to pay yourself a reasonable salary? Were you able to put aside money for a rainy day?

Exercise 2: Divide the amount you charged by the number of rooms you staged. Do you see a pattern from job to job? Maybe this is an alternative way to estimate how much you should charge.

Exercise 3: Divide what you charged for each job by the list price (not the price it sold for). Do you see any patterns emerge? If yes, would this be an alternative way to figure out how much to charge on each job?

Exercise 4: Divide what you charged for each home by the square footage. Are you seeing any similarity from house to house? If yes, then it's possible for you to start charging by the square foot.

Whatever method you use, you will always need to adjust for luxury level, number of rooms, size of rooms, etc. Here is the link again for the Free Worksheet for these exercises.

Even if you have a rock solid method of determining your pricing, it's always good to take a look at your numbers from different angles to see if you should make adjustments or stick with what you've got.**

The end of the year or quarter is a great time to re-evaluate and set new goals. We created a beautiful free workbook and webinar to help you dream BIG for your future. Let's get your new year started off right, with a plan and strategies to take it to the next level. Watch the free goals webinar here.

If you need more help on how to set your prices, the Pricing Lab for Home Stagers™ walks you through using our proven formulas to create sustainable, profitable prices.

*Extra bonus points for refining your estimated cost per job by including your overhead. Do this by adding up your fixed costs like insurance, rent, utilities, salaries, etc, and dividing that by the number of jobs you did. Add the result to your direct costs like moving, inventory, assistant, etc to get a more accurate job cost.

**These exercises originated courtesy of home staging industry leader, Michelle Minch, of Moving Mountains Design.