Home stagers know the importance of curb appeal. Those first impressions of the home you are staging are critical. Curb appeal sets the tone for the visitor of the home. Good curb appeal gets the shopper in the home and visualizing themselves living there. A lack of curb appeal risks that home shopper staying in the car.
The same is true for your home staging business. Your home staging business needs good curb appeal.
Let’s first consider the curb appeal for a house.
To give a house good curb appeal, you make sure the lawn is taken care of, the bushes are pruned, the weeds have been pulled, the kids toys have been removed from the yard (if the sellers still occupy), and tidy up everything that the person notices when they first arrive at the house. And that’s just the bare minimum!
A house with great curb appeal may have flower boxes in the windows, fresh fragrant plants along the pathway to the house, and fresh paint. Opening the door is statement when they see the inside of the home for the first time.
That curb appeal ensuring positive first impressions of the home are just as important as the great staging work that you do on the inside.
What are the first impressions that people have of your staging business?
Your home staging business has first impressions too. That first impression happens as soon as someone learns that you are a home stager. Sometimes your first impression is the way you are dressed at the initial meeting with the potential client, how clean or messy your car is, and how you speak when you call a potential client. In these cases, you are your curb appeal.
However, in many cases, your website is your first impression to a potential client. Your website is the curb appeal to your business.
Does your website have great curb appeal? Does it even have the bare minimum for good curb appeal? Wait, does your staging business even have a website?
Put yourself in the shoes of a potential client who visits your website. What do they see? Remember, their time is as valuable as the person shopping for the home that you staged. Does your website give this potential client a reason to read about you and your projects, or does it make them want to get back in the car and keep driving to the next house on their list?
A website with great curb appeal will have these 6 features:
- It is visually modern, professional, and attractive.
- It loads fast. Website loading speed is critical for the visitor. If they have to wait too long for it to load, then they will leave.
- It explains who you are, the services you provide, and the ways you can help the potential client.
- It shows examples of your work, and makes it easy for the visitor to navigate through the pictures and understand what type of property and service the pictures are showing.
- It needs to be easy for them to contact you.
- It needs to be responsive, which means that it looks nice on smartphones and tablets. Your website will be viewed on a mobile device, so it better look good.
Unfortunately, so many home stagers have a website that do the bare minimum for curb appeal. Their website looks like it was made 3 years ago (or more!), which is ancient in terms of websites – even new websites can look old. The pictures take several seconds to load, which is an eternity for someone visiting a website. The pictures aren’t intuitive to navigate. And their website is hard to read when it is viewed on a smartphone.
If your website doesn’t have those 6 key features, then your website has bad curb appeal. If your website isn’t getting visitors to stay or contact you, then bad curb appeal could be the reason.
Imagine you walk into a house that has wallpaper with pictures of wildlife or fruit (you had that wallpaper growing up, didn’t you?), orange shag carpeting that has a pathway to the kitchen matted by years of walking, and a kitchen that has those white cabinets with wood trim that were so popular in the 1980s. You would be turned off by a home that looks so dated, even though the bones of the house are probably really good.
Just like the house we just described, a website that looks like it was made several years ago or more typically has that same effect on your business.
What if you don’t have a website? Well, that is like the Realtor trying to sell the house without a home stager. That Realtor is forcing people to picture how the family room will look without furnishing it with seating, area rugs, bookcases, and a TV. Is that room down the hall a bedroom or an office? Realtors should not rely on the home shopper to visualize that!
A home staging business without a website forces the potential client to visualize that you are a professional who can help them with their specific needs. A home staging business with no website is like a Realtor who didn’t hire a home stager.
Home stagers are in the business of making their clients’ property shine. If you don’t give your business great curb appeal, can they trust you to give the same care to their most valuable possession that holds years of memories?
A website provides the curb appeal for a home stager’s business. It is up to you to decide how good you want your curb appeal to be.
Stager Sidekick can help give your business the curb appeal it deserves with a proven website template that is modern and professional, or with a website that is custom built for your business. Click here to learn more.
