Christine Bickley in Brisbane sent me a recent video she and Deb Lindner of Mink Home Staging did explaining the fact that Deb and Christine are “really in the same business – helping people sell properties by creating that emotional connection that attracts buyers, draws them to the property and gets them to pay a premium prices for a well presented home“.
In upper-end interior photography stagers, frequently are called stylists or interior designers and are almost always are an integral part of a shoot. Similarly, top real estate agents frequently hire a stager to get a property ready for market or act as a stager themselves. Staging can involve rearranging the homeowners furniture, removing some of it or moving in furniture when listing a vacant property. My experience is that staging is always a big win for everyone involved.
Getting to know one or more stagers can help a real estate photographer get more business in an area because top agents have homes staged and agents that hire a stager are likely to care about good photography. Stagers and real estate photographers have the same clients! I recommended that real estate photographers do everything in their power to build a business relationship with one or more stagers. By business relationship, I mean refer business to each other. Stagers probably have more opportunities to refer business to photographers, but it can work both ways.
Comments on previous posts about working with stagers indicate that many photographers understand the possibilities of working with stagers, but few actually manage to partner with them. Here are suggestions for what a joint business relation looks like:
- Promote each others services jointly to new and existing clients.
- Suggest the stagger includes photography services in their staging package. Negotiate a special mutually acceptable rate for a staging/photography package.
- Allow the stager to use photography from staging/photography package deals to market their staging services in return for getting photography business from the stagers clients.
All the stagers we’ve worked with are anxious to collect quality photographs of their work, and I’ve never met a stager that could shoot good interior photographs. There’s just a natural symbiosis between interior photography and staging.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.