FAQs

When building a website, it is important to consider Search Engine Optimization (or SEO as it is commonly referred). However, it is really hard to measure all that impacts search engines, as to date, the major search providers have not disclosed the details of their ever-changing formulas. However, we believe that your Marketing Name is good for search engines. As Aaron Wall the SEO guru and author of the popular SEOBook website recently wrote, “Start with a good descriptive domain name. You spend less to market & brand descriptive URLs. Plus, they are good for search engines and for humans.”

By partnering with HomeStaging.com and building out your Marketing Name, you get to leverage the domain age and the strength of the HomeStaging.com brand. Remember, Google has long maintained that if you build your website for people and make it logical for them to find what they are looking for, the search rankings will take care of themselves. We are sure that you will agree that if you have “College.HomeStaging.com” as your domain name, those that find you through search engines will know what to expect at this domain… and if it is good for searchers, it will be good and relevant for the search engines.

There are also many leading search marketing experts who believe that having an exact match root domain name as well as having a relevant keyword as a sub-domain are two of the top, on-site ranking factors.

Marketing Names are leased on either a monthly, quarterly, or annually basis. These leases are done in accordance with our Terms of Service. In accordance with these terms, you have renewal rights on your name so long as your payments remain active.

To lease a Marketing Name, you will need to be logged in to your member account. This is a free account that you can create here (if you don’t already have one).

1. To lease a Marketing Name, you can do so from your Account Dashboard. Simply click on the “Add Marketing Name” link as depicted in the screenshot here.
2. You will need to search for your desired Marketing Name. If it is available, it will show you its status and allow you to purchase via PayPal or by using a major credit card. Note: you do not have to have an existing PayPal account to sign up.
3. Upon clicking “Submit/Purchase”, you will be taken over to PayPal which HomeStaging.com uses to process our payments securely. We have chosen PayPal due to their ability to provide a high-level of security and trust for our customers.
4. You will be returned to HomeStaging.com to confirm your order. You will have the option of specifying where you want your Marketing Name pointed when you return from PayPal.

HomeStaging.com is a joint venture between the HomeStaging.com domain service and Left of the Dot Media Inc who got together to build out a website that connects home stagers with those looking to obtain home staging services. It is our goal to ensure that every house sold sells for its optimal value while furthering the profession of home staging. Should you have more questions about the management of HomeStaging.com, please contact us.

HomeStaging.com is a joint venture between the HomeStaging.com domain service and Left of the Dot Media Inc who got together to build out a website that connects home stagers with those looking to obtain home staging services. It is our goal to ensure that every house sold sells for its optimal value while furthering the profession of home staging. Should you have more questions about the management of HomeStaging.com, please contact us.

We have 3 offerings for you:

1. FREE Listing on HomeStaging.com, limited time offer
2. Premium and Featured Listings which gets you additional promotion via the HomeStaging.com lead directory are priced at $25 per month with discounts for quarterly or annual accounts
3. Marketing Names have variable lease pricing, ranging from $25 to $100 per month. The most popular search phrases (that is, those that are expected to get the most search traffic) are at the top range, while 95% of our other Marketing Names are priced at only $25 per month.

When you lease a Marketing Name, you also receive a coupon code to apply against your HomeStaging.com directory listing (SAVE $25 or 50% TODAY!).

All charges will be processed in US currency.

All payments for directory listings are currently single payments and do not automatically renew. If you want to re-list your company, you must click “renew” next to your listing in your Client Dashboard. You will be prompted to re-enter your PayPal/credit card details. We are working to resolve this issue; in the meantime we encourage you to consider longer terms (quarterly or annually) for your listings. This will make it easier for you and make sure that you do not miss out on any potential ranking should your business be de-listed from our directory for lapsed payment.

For our Marketing Names, your PayPal or Credit Card account will automatically be billed every payment period, i.e. month/quarter/year. This ensures that your Marketing Name is protected for you.

If you have paid via PayPal, you can cancel your subscription from your PayPal dashboard and clicking “Cancel a Recurring Payment”. This gives you the power to cancel the auto-bill yourself without waiting on our Accounting department. You can Contact Us as well, and we will pass on your request to the guys in Accounting, but it is faster for you to do it directly via PayPal.

That being said, why do you want to cancel? Was it something we said? Please Contact Us and we can help you get the most out of our services

We will do everything possible to make you happy. But, if for some reason you are not, and you cancel within 14 days of activating your Marketing Name (and contact us to tell us so) , we will refund all of your money. This is our guarantee to you. Refunds are batched every few days. Due to normal bank processing times, it takes about 7 business days for the credit to appear in your account, from the time it was refunded.

We are presently providing a 100% Guaranteed Satisfaction offer with our Virtual Home Staging service.

Home staging, real estate staging, house fluffing, or simply “staging”, as it is commonly known is anything that helps a home seller make their home more attractive and appealing to potential buyers.

The exact definition of what staging encompasses does vary, but typically, a professional home stager brings in furniture, artwork, plants, rugs and accessories to make a house look it’s best while on the market. Some “full service” stagers also offer contractor consulting services which may include choosing paints, tiles, carpets, etc, and working with the contractors to get the house ready.

Sometimes the seller will want to use their own furnishings, and the stager can consult with them on how to reduce clutter, open up rooms more, etc. This specialty of making the most of what you have is often called “Redesign”, and there are many home stagers who do both Home Staging and interior redesign.

Sometimes house stagers will also help reduce the negative impact of some challenge the house has. For example, if there is traffic noise from a busy street nearby, they might put a fountain in the yard to create a more pleasant atmosphere. One may think that buyers make logical decisions, but often emotions guide buyers to what just “feels right”. Creating a warm, inviting and attractive atmosphere can make a huge difference to the seller of a home.

A new world of home staging is also emerging with the advent of Virtual Home Staging. This is basically digitally placing 3D models into a photograph to help Vacant Properties sell faster. Virtual Home Staging requires both a 3D artist (or someone skilled in 3D modeling) and a professional home stager. Vacant Room Staging is typically used to boost the appeal of online imagery or to help prospective buyers visualize the potential of a room or space.

Staging can range from a simple consultation with the sellers about how to reduce clutter, to completely running a project, including painting, landscaping, flooring and, of course, staging the interior of the home with furniture, plants, artwork accessories and more For more details.

HomeStaging.com is a joint venture between the HomeStaging.com domain service and Left of the Dot Media Inc who got together to build out a website that connects home stagers with those looking to obtain home staging services. It is our goal to ensure that every house sold sells for its optimal value while furthering the profession of home staging. Should you have more questions about the management of HomeStaging.com, please contact us.

It only takes 5 steps for you to get started and receive your virtually-staged photos back. The process is simple:

1. Sign up for free
2. Upload your images
3. Describe your photos
4. Pay for your virtual staging (money-back guarantee)
5. Receive staged photos in 3-5 days via email

After our virtual staging partner digitally places furniture into the photos, your staged photos will be sent back to you in JPG format.

Staging your vacant room photos can be done for as little as $60 per room, depending on the number of images you order. Click here to view our pricing. A single image is presently priced at $70.

Panoramic photos are not recommended. Most of the time they will appear distorted and you will not be satisfied with how they turn out.

As you will be returned your photos in the same size and quality that you had sent them in, it is a good idea to send us the best quality you can get. We recommend photos to be at least 500 pixels wide. For reference, the average webpage shows at about 1024 pixels wide. This means that if your photo covers your full screen and does not look distorted or grainy, it will probably work for us. If you plan on printing or enlarging your photos, we recommend sending them in as good as resolution as you can muster.

.JPG or .JPEG format is the best format to send to us.

We can only virtually stage and furnish vacant rooms at this time. If you have a furnished room, we would recommend hiring a professional stager to come in and work with the space, then hiring a photographer to take good pictures.

But if you have vacant room photos, then get them virtually staged. You will get more calls and more leads from your online listings as you help would-be buyers better visualize the potential of a space.

Our 3d Artist and Staging partner can virtually stage an order consisting of 1-7 photos in 3-5 business days. If you have a large amount of photos it may take a few additional days.

If you need your photos in a rush, oh-my-god-emergency, we understand that you will sometimes have short deadlines. Depending upon our 3D fulfillment partner’s availability, they will try to work with you on a specific delivery date if you absolutely need them quickly. However, the best option remains you getting your photos to us as early as possible. Our designers also treat every photo as a work of art and prefer not to be rushed.

If you are waiting for your virtually staged photos before publishing your listing to the MLS, we encourage you to get your vacant room properties up first, then change them out with your virtually changed photos once they are ready.

For most projects, we are unable to remove furniture from your submitted picture. However, in some instances our 3D artist partners have worked magic, depending upon where the furniture is placed they may be able to remove it or add accessories to the furniture to make it look better (e.g., adding pillows to a bed or couch)

You can email or upload your photos prior to placing an order and our fulfillment partner will let you know what they can do with them.

These tips should help you get some good photos that can be virtually staged:

1. Try to avoid using an excessively wide angle camera or distorting the proportions of a room. The staging process matches the furniture to the proportions of the room and if your photos make a room appear larger than it actually is we may add furniture that would not actually fit in the room. Distorted photos also limit our ability to match the furniture to the proper perspective of the room.
2. Take the picture from the corner of the room for best results.
3. Avoid having bright lights or windows near the center of the picture.
4. Set your camera to take the brightest and “cleanest” pictures
5. Choose the highest resolution that your camera would allow. The higher the resolution, the better the picture, the more satisfied you will be with the results.
6. Just as though you were showing the house, if there are any lights in the room turn all of them on.
7. Shoot directly across the room, not up or down.
8. Use a portable tripod if available to prevent any motion blur.
9. Try to avoid the “fish bowl” look that you often get with wide-angle shots as these will not work with virtual staging
10. Try to avoid standing in areas where furniture would commonly be placed in the room
11. Stand in areas where the furniture would look most appealing from if it were actually in the room at the time of photographing.

Happy photographing!

No. Virtual Staging is about envisioning the true potential of a vacant space, not about full remodeling. We are unable to patch or move walls or do anything that is designed to deceive the prospective home buyers.

Home staging, real estate staging, house fluffing, or simply “staging”, as it is commonly known is anything that helps a home seller make their home more attractive and appealing to potential buyers.

The exact definition of what staging encompasses does vary, but typically, a professional home stager brings in furniture, artwork, plants, rugs and accessories to make a house look it’s best while on the market. Some “full service” stagers also offer contractor consulting services which may include choosing paints, tiles, carpets, etc, and working with the contractors to get the house ready.

Sometimes the seller will want to use their own furnishings, and the stager can consult with them on how to reduce clutter, open up rooms more, etc. This specialty of making the most of what you have is often called “Redesign”, and there are many home stagers who do both Home Staging and interior redesign.

Sometimes house stagers will also help reduce the negative impact of some challenge the house has. For example, if there is traffic noise from a busy street nearby, they might put a fountain in the yard to create a more pleasant atmosphere. One may think that buyers make logical decisions, but often emotions guide buyers to what just “feels right”. Creating a warm, inviting and attractive atmosphere can make a huge difference to the seller of a home.

A new world of home staging is also emerging with the advent of Virtual Home Staging. This is basically digitally placing 3D models into a photograph to help Vacant Properties sell faster. Virtual Home Staging requires both a 3D artist (or someone skilled in 3D modeling) and a professional home stager. Vacant Room Staging is typically used to boost the appeal of online imagery or to help prospective buyers visualize the potential of a room or space.

Staging can range from a simple consultation with the sellers about how to reduce clutter, to completely running a project, including painting, landscaping, flooring and, of course, staging the interior of the home with furniture, plants, artwork accessories and more For more details.

If you are selling a home, you may be wondering about house staging. Here is a partial list of the benefits that home staging provides:

1. Staged Homes sell faster.
2. Staged homes get higher offers
3. Staged houses look better in the MLS pictures, getting more potential buyers to actually come see the house in the first place.
4. Staged houses have an edge over competing properties, and the staging can often sway the final decision.

Depending on what part of the country (or even which country) you are in, the cost of home staging can range quite a bit. In the San Francisco Bay Area, some stagers report that the average is around $2,500 per house. As every job is different, we encourage you to try out our Home Staging Pricing Calculator that helps you figure out the Cost of Home Staging.

While to some $2500 (or more)  may seem like a lot of money for house staging, but many sellers report that they got at least $25,000 more for the house because they staged. That would be a 10- fold return on their investment, usually within a few months. There aren’t many options like that available to a seller that provide that kind of return.

In addition, there is the benefit of the home selling more quickly. It is often hard to put an exact value on that aspect, but ask anyone who has been transferred across the country, and sold a house in the process, and they will likely tell you that the speed of sale was very important. House staging can have a big impact, and often lead to a faster sale.

Time and time again, it has been proven that home staging works and will boost the final sales price. Absolutely.

Why? Because it has also been proven that home buyers buy on emotion, and for them, the more likely they can imagine living there, they are more likely to make an offer. And once you get the emotive hooks into Home Buyers, they are more likely to pay a premium to have that which they desire.

With a well staged home, it is not uncommon to get multiple offers as multiple buyers feel that your home is “just right for them”. And when you get multiple offers, the price increases and you make more money.

Added on top of this is the speed at which a staged home can sell vs either an cluttered home or a vacant property. If a property remains on the market for a longer period of time, there is a capital carrying cost associated with this, especially if you are trying to time market movement… and in today’s housing market, with some significant swings, you can make a lot of money if you can time things well with a fast sale to a motivated buyer.

Also, the longer that a property remains on the market Home Buyers have been trained to think that a seller must be “motivated” (as is their Realtor), and when a Home Buyer thinks that a seller is motivated, lower offers are often the result.

Let’s say that you are like many and attempt to got it alone without staging your home. Your house has been on a market for a while, and while you have gotten some offers, nothing has made you move. You pull your house off of the market temporarily while speaking with a Home Stager who advises on some minor modifications, and redesigns the buying experience.

Can you modify your listing price after home staging? Absolutely, there are countless stories of people who have invested anywhere from $3k to $10k in pre-sale improvements and staging only to get that back 10-fold with a higher listing price.

For the most part, these terms mean exactly the same thing. If you are reading over our Directory of Home Stagers, you will find that some call themselves “Stagers” while others “Designers”, and still others “Redesigners”.

The term used is as much a question of geography as it is difference. We have been told that “Property Styling” is a term used frequently to describe the profession of home staging in Australia.

There is a difference, however, in “Redesign” and “Staging” where the former should be considered a type of home staging. Redesign tends to rely more on existing furniture and things that a homeowner already has and is not involved in vacant room staging.

Because having 10 bidders on a property is better than 2. And when you stage your home, you allow prospective buyers to create an emotional attachment with your property. And when they are attached, they are more likely to move to a higher price point. And if you can get more bidders, you will make more money.

This is often what Professional Home Stagers hear after giving a quote for staging… “But I am selling my house anyway. Why should I spend money on it?”

This is a simple answer. Because the Home Stager who suggested these improvements believes that by spending the money, you will be able to get a better return on your investment: 2x, 3x 5x even 10x your initial expense. If you could make an additional $50k after spending only $5k, wouldn’t you do this every day?

There are few investments in the world that have been able to deliver such significant returns in such a short period as pre-sale staging.

There is nothing stopping you from trying to stage your own home; however, professional home stagers have something that you never will have: objectivity.

It is very difficult to assess your own home with objective eyes. You are too emotionally attached and think that the antique vase that you picked up antiquing that you absolutely adore would be loved by all who come and shop.

And face it, after living in your home for multiple years, you have grown blinders on the warts of your home: smudges on walls, furniture just the way it is, because that is how it has always been, etc.

If you are unsure, contact a few professional home stagers and ask for a consultation.

Selling a home is often filled with enough stress and is time consuming, often it is best to leave certain tasks to the professionals..

HomeStaging.com is a joint venture between the HomeStaging.com domain service and Left of the Dot Media Inc who got together to build out a website that connects home stagers with those looking to obtain home staging services. It is our goal to ensure that every house sold sells for its optimal value while furthering the profession of home staging. Should you have more questions about the management of HomeStaging.com, please contact us.