Building A Home Staging Business Website that Sells with Christine Cowles

About Today’s Guest Christine Cowles

Today, I’ve got Christine Cowles on the show! She is one of our International Home Staging Awards 2020 Winner in the Best Home Staging Website category!

An attractive home staging business website is crucial in today’s real estate business. We not only need a place online to house all of our beautiful home staging photos, we also need to leverage its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) power to be found online. Our website also serves as a communication tool to help our potential home staging clients understand why they should hire us vs. our competitors.

In this episode of The Home Staging Show podcast, our International Home Staging Awards 2020 Winner Christine Cowles of Styled and Staged Santa Barbara shared her process of creating her award-winning home staging business website and how she leveraged her website to attract more home staging clients.

I think your website is such an important sales tool for your home staging business, especially since that’s how our customers can find us and check us out, before they call us. Just like houses, where over 90% of buyers first look for homes online before they go to an open house, it is the same with hiring a home stagers. This is why we did a Photo Week last week, to help you refine your photography and presentations. And this week, we are talking about the website, since you need the website to house all of your photos. 

Christine started staging homes in 2016 while working full time as the fundraising and communications director for a private school, which was, at many times, more than a 40-hour a week job. 

Her husband, Mauricio, was also working full time and they would stage in the evenings and on weekends. They would work all day then go rent a moving truck, meet at their storage unit, load up for staging and work very late into the evening or on weekends moving furniture in and out of the houses they were staging.

In 2017, she took a break from staging homes (still working full time at the school) to take a course through a local non-profit organization, geared toward helping women become self-employed. She wanted to really understand all aspects of running a business and set up their staging company correctly. In early 2018, she started buying furniture wholesale, invested in a moving van and started staging again. She left my full time job in mid-2019 and her husband left his job in early 2020 (just in time for COVID – yeah!).

It’s been a wild ride, but they are fortunate that their local real estate market is active and most agents here understand the value of staging. Prior to starting Styled & Staged Santa Barbara, she worked for 20 years in fundraising and communications in the non-profit and government sectors. She pursued a graphic design certificate from UC Santa Barbara, completing the program in 2009. As most non-profits have a lean staff, she produced the print and online marketing materials for these organizations, giving her the ability and skills to create Styled & Staged Santa Barbara’s website and other collateral.

This Week on The Home Staging Show Podcast

• About Christine, her business, and the journey to where she is now (00:07:41)

• Tell us about the services you provide in your Home Staging business. (00:12:46)

• Tell us about your market in Santa Barbara, what is it like? (00:16:49)

• What kind of home do you typically stage in Santa Barbara? (00:18:38)

• How has Covid-19 impacted your business? (00:22:09)