Set for Success: The September 2025 Bosley Podcast
We were thrilled to participate in Christan Bosley’s “Like a Bos” podcast this September. Christan dropped by Stage Right with her crew and we spent an enjoyable 50 minutes talking about where the market is, where it’s going, and how a staging business needs to work to thrive.
Enjoy!
Set for Success: The Mother-Daughter Duo Transforming Spaces
Set for Success: The Mother-Daughter Duo Transforming Spaces
In this episode, we take a look at home staging through the lens of a family-run business. You’ll hear how smart, intentional staging can shape buyer perception, create emotional connection, and help homes sell faster.
We’ll dive into real-life transformations, generational takes on design, and where the industry is headed, all while highlighting the unique dynamic of a mother-daughter duo.
If you’d like to hear more “Like a Bos” podcasts with Christan Bosley, you can find the full series on Apple and Spotify or on the Like a Bos podcast site.
Podcast Transcript
Christan Bosley — When a home feels just right, there is generally a team behind it. And in this case, it’s family. On today’s episode of Like a Bos, I’m joined by a mother-daughter duo who have been styling Toronto homes since 2002. We dive into the psychology of staging, generational design perspectives, and of course, how to make buyers fall in love at first sight.
Announcer — For nearly a century, Bosley has been helping to shape the landscape of Canadian real estate. This podcast is an extension of that legacy, our way of staying connected to what matters most to you. Join us as we sit down with leading voices from across the industry and beyond to explore the ideas, trends, and stories that move real estate forward. Whether you’re an agent, investor, homeowner, or just curious about the market, there’s something here for you.
Christan Bosley — Hello, everyone, and welcome to Like a Bos. I am your host, Christan Bosley, president and broker of record of Bosley Real Estate. This, of course, is the podcast where we bring you real conversations with people shaping the real estate industry. Today, we welcome Carmen and Jessica from Stage Right.
Carmen Wageman — Hi.
Jessica Steinman — Hi.
Christan Bosley — Thank you so much for joining us today. So I had the privilege of meeting Carmen way back in the day, perhaps 2007, when I started in real estate sales. So we have a very long history of helping each other. And of course, over time, we’ve become more integrated into the brokerage aspect and some of the great things that you guys are doing here. So I’m looking forward to talking about it today. Very exciting.
Carmen Wageman — And welcome to our space.
Christan Bosley — Thank you. Important to note that Stage Right stages all of our podcast space, and we are so fortunate to be in your space today. So thank you.
Carmen Wageman — My pleasure.
Christan Bosley — All right, so Carmen, let’s start at the very beginning. You obviously founded this company. What was it that really got yourself into wanting to go in that direction?
Carmen Wageman — So I was designing at the time. I had never heard of staging. I don’t even think staging was the word to describe what we do at the time. I think it was called something else. And I was actually helping a friend buy a house. She was living in Boston part-time and her husband asked me to look at houses with him and tell him whether or not he should show her the house.
And so the agent overheard me saying, no, this house won’t be good. You can’t put the furniture in this area or this area is too small. Where are you going put your TV? And so she started to get a feel that perhaps I could help her with some of her listings.
And so one day she just called me out of the blue and said, I have a house and it needs furniture. Can you help me? And I was a little blown away. I was like, how could I help you do that? And she says, well, there’s rental companies but I need you to go and pick it and help me get this house dressed. And that was the very beginning and that was in 2002.
And then because I did such a good job with her, the people in her agency said, oh, can I have her number? And then it just went from there. And we’ve never advertised. It just — word of mouth. It was all word of mouth.
Christan Bosley — Amazing.
Carmen Wageman — The only advertising we’ve ever done is on our trucks.
Christan Bosley — So can I ask just for curiosity sake, 2002, were you kind of like young child, teenage years?
Jessica Steinman — So 2002 I was in grade two.
Christan Bosley — Grade two. Okay. So you’ve had the privilege of most of your life watching your mom build this.
Jessica Steinman — Yeah, I’ve grown up with her starting it off with rental companies, her realizing that the real money is in renting. So her starting to purchase furniture in and store it in our garage and then her starting to really get into staging and her getting very popular to the point where I started coming home and there were furniture pieces missing. And I went to my mom, like mom, can you stop renting the dining chairs?
Carmen Wageman — One day she came to me. One day she came to me and she says, you’re not going to rent our beds, are you? She was afraid she was going to come home from school and get ready for bed and she’d be sleeping on the floor or something. Yes. I did pillage from my own house in the beginning.
Christan Bosley — Well, everybody has to do things to get started. That’s right. Amazing. Jessica, at what point did you decide to join the business?
Jessica Steinman — I joined in 2017. I was right out of university. I just had finished my degree in psychology and I was trying to figure out my next steps in life. And Carmen was like, hey, if you want to come help me out for a little bit while you’re figuring out your next steps, I could use some help. And I just haven’t left. Carved my little section out.
Christan Bosley — Correct me if I’m wrong. I too have a degree in psychology. Have you found it helpful in the family business dynamic?
Jessica Steinman — I, so I say kinda, but if you ask Carmen, she always compliments my customer service and my way of understanding situations and communications — she definitely sees the degree come out.
Christan Bosley — So it sounds like it was more of a natural transition for you, not necessarily requiring any convincing.
Carmen Wageman — No. There was no intention for her to stay.
Jessica Steinman — No, it was kinda like I walked in to just lend a hand for a couple of months, just support. And then I started finding areas that I thought that I could help improve and change and support. And then I’d bring those ideas up and Carmen kept saying, well then go for it. Just do it. I don’t have the time. So if you see an area that you can make more efficient or change so that we would then earn more money, go for it. And I just kept going until I created that kind of job in this company and carved my space out.
Carmen Wageman — And so Jessica does all the operations. And she can move into the design portion, although that’s not what she loves to do, but in a pinch, she could stage, she can do all these things.
Jessica Steinman — When Carmen has gone away or been sick, I’ll step in, I can do a staging, I can do a walkthrough. I’m on all of our design jobs as well. But my love is in the operation, business, finance side of the company.
Carmen Wageman — 00:06:50 Which is not my love.
Christan Bosley — Carmen was giving me a tour of your incredible warehouse. Incredible, by the way. And she did kind of offhandedly mention that you were a little bit type A. So I’m not surprised to hear that you’re in operations because you need that for operations and execution, right? And it is a very, it’s like left versus right side brain. Creative operations, like very different skill sets. So I can see why the partnership has been so successful.
Carmen Wageman — Oh yeah. Ying and yang.
Christan Bosley — Oh yeah, good way to put it. So I mean, as someone who has spent my entire life growing up in a family business, one of the things that I have always kind of paid attention to is boundaries between personal and professional. In my family, there were none. Do you have any boundaries between the two of you?
Carmen Wageman — You go first.
Jessica Steinman — You go first.
(laughter)
Carmen Wageman — I think we have learned boundaries over the last seven years. And I think as we age together in this business, we’ve learned not to bring personal problems into work. Even though we’re mother daughter, we keep that outside of work. I think that has helped us quite a bit to work together. We’re all work here and then outside of work. I would like to say we’re all personal outside of work, but that never, we do talk about work on the outside, but I think that’s because she loves what she does and I love what I do. So we do talk about work on, but sometimes we’ll say, let’s put a pin in it. We’re sick of it.
Jessica Steinman — Or our husbands say that.
Carmen Wageman — Or our husbands say that, yeah. Enough, enough, let’s talk about something else.
Jessica Steinman — But yeah. But we try very hard to make that distinction. So I’ll call her in work settings, Carmen, rather than mom. And then when we’re talking about personal things. So I try very hard, even just the language that I use, to set up a boundary to recognize how we should be talking to each other and what we’re talking about in our communication styles. And we try very hard.
Carmen Wageman — And when we were designing the space that we work in right now, we took everything back to the studs and rebuilt it and rebuilt our offices. And we chose to not put a wall in between our office and just to share an office too. So not only are we at work together, we actually share an office together as well.
Jessica Steinman — Yeah, we spend a lot of time together.
Carmen Wageman — But to be fair, I am out a lot. Like I do a lot of the walkthroughs, especially in the busy season.
Jessica Steinman — It’s my office when we’re in the busy season, yeah.
Christan Bosley — Okay, I love that. So Carmen, you’ve been in the industry for a while, obviously, 2002 you said. How have you seen staging evolve between then and now? Because your business has adapted a lot, right?
Carmen Wageman — Sure, it’s mostly evolved just in that it’s mainstream now. When I started, people, when I would do a walkthrough, people didn’t quite understand why I was there. And so when I was talking about replacing furniture, they were like, what? What are you talking about? People aren’t buying my furniture, they’re buying the house. And so I had to explain to them the value of the service and get them to understand why they were spending money to prepare the home. And I have been escorted out of the house a few times with some of the things that I would recommend because they would get so offended.
And, but now thanks to HGTV and all the programs that are on about house transformations and how quickly it can happen, and even just the little things. And I think people started to get into that mindset that you can improve a house like that. And so it’s been unique for me to watch it go from, I don’t know, just one or two stagings a week to three stagings a day during the busy season, up to four a day. And how everybody’s doing it and how a lot of agents are offering it as part of their service.
Christan Bosley — Are you seeing that shift now? I’m just wondering with the market shifting, are you seeing that shift? There are a lot of realtors who are not putting that in their package anymore, right? Are you seeing that across the board or?
Carmen Wageman — Not putting it in their package as part of the fees?
Christan Bosley — Yeah, not as part of their fees package because properties are sitting on the market longer, the market shifted a bit.
Jessica Steinman — So it’s hard, right? Because when we ask for payment, it’s either the agent paying or the client paying, but we don’t know what is done after the house is sold. So I say it’s about 50-50 split between the client paying versus the agent paying, but then I don’t know what they do later, right?
Christan Bosley — Yeah, we’re seeing that too. That’s something that we’re seeing for sure with our agents and I would say market-wide. So let’s talk about your approach. When a seller agent brings you in, what’s your process on that first walkthrough to the final kind of reveal for the client?
Carmen Wageman — I guess my approach is the first thing that I ask is, when are you going on the market? Because what I recommend will be impacted on whether or not they have time. Sometimes we’ll walk in and they’ll say, well, we want to be on the market next week. And I’ll look at the house and it may need a lot of work, but now because we don’t have time to do that work, my job is to redirect attention away from the deficiencies and onto the beauty and what it can look like.
And so I go maybe in a little bit deeper into replacing some of the furniture and maybe some of the lighting to brighten the space up. Most of the time people want to walk through with me and hear what I have to say. And over the years, I’ve been able to massage what I say and I say it in such a way that I now get the, “you don’t have to be kind. I know what my house looks like. I just want to make money, just tell me what to do”. But I’m still very gentle with the homeowners because staging is about creating a mass appeal and it’s not about critiquing somebody’s taste.
And so I’m just there to make sure that the furniture is the right scale for the space, the room, which would make the room feel as big as it can. Does it have as much lighting in the space? Do we need to change the color out in order to brighten the space? And does the house feel fresh and new? And so new could be the furniture. The furniture that we bring in adds that refresh. And so the kitchen can be dated, but if the furniture all around it is all new, it actually lifts that kitchen up.
Jessica Steinman — So once she’s done her walkthrough, she’ll give us the quote and the notes to relay to the client. And then we’ll schedule a staging date and we’ll arrive on site. So the client will then see us next, you know, early afternoon on the day of the staging. But we have already, you know, a couple of days in advance, picked everything, created the design. And then the morning of we’re pulling it all together, making changes as needed, adding more in. So we’re really working on the staging in the morning. And then we do the installation in the afternoon. So even though they’ve only seen us in the afternoon for a couple of hours, we’ve been really working towards the goal, the design that Carmen has been explaining during the walkthrough.
So by five o’clock, there’s a wow moment happens where we can walk everybody through at the end of the transformation. And they can see the house that they’re about to list right at the very end.
Christan Bosley — Amazing. I know Carmen that you mentioned that you’re a little delicate. And of course, staging is about presenting the home and not critiquing the style, which I think is the most impactful sentence. Really, really great sentence to teach realtors to use as well. But so what are some of the key conversations you need to have upfront with some of the sellers if they’re feeling hesitant or unsure about staging?
Carmen Wageman — Well, one of the first things that I tell them is that I’m really here to just make you money. I’m here to give your house the best shot at making the most money. And I think a lot of people’s homes are their largest investment. And so that’s music to their ears, is that somebody’s there to help them with that investment.
But then they also, I also add to that, that I endeavored to use everything I possibly can within the home that is currently there. So I’m not a type of stager that wants everything out and I’ll redo the whole house. I want the house to feel designed, loved and lived in, and not sterilize it. So if there are pieces in there that do not need to be removed — and there’s a huge hassle to doing staging, to removing things, finding storage for it and all that. It’s very expensive to remove a lot of those items. If I can use them, I will. And I find that stagings actually look better when we add gorgeous sofa and area rug and coffee table, but leave their antique pieces that were finds somewhere along the way. And that adds that realism that these people actually live here. It’s not a rented piece.
Christan Bosley — Exactly.
Carmen Wageman — I love leaving family photos that look like they’ve had fun on vacation, that they’re hugging and there’s kids laughing and things like that. That adds that warmth and love to a house. And nobody wants to buy a house that feels sterile. They want to buy a house that feels like a successful, happy, loving family has lived in it. And therefore they too can be that way. So that’s what we’re always trying to strive for.
But we also want to take it up, maybe just a little bit more than that, and just inspire people. Like, this is like, wow! You know? And because a well-designed house, I mean, that’s what it looks like.
Christan Bosley — That’s what sells the buyers, to your point, right? That aspirational aspect of, oh, maybe I can actually live here. Maybe this can actually be mine, right?
Carmen Wageman — Correct. And because most people don’t live in a house that’s fully furnished with beautiful furniture. And so of course, you know, if you do it well, which I think we do, it does that. It’s different from what they’re used to seeing when they go to friends and families in their own home.
Christan Bosley — Yeah. Of note, Carmen had to stage my entire main floor, took all the furniture out of it, put all new furniture in it. And I will tell you that my husband and I almost divorced overstaging our home. Oh! He walked in, he was beside himself. He was like, what are we doing here? This is not our home. And I was like, yeah, this is the point that you don’t understand. It’s actually not our home anymore. We are selling it. That’s right. Wrap your head around it.
Carmen Wageman — And that brings up a good point too, because for some people it’s a very emotional thing to sell your home. It can be for a variety of reasons too. It can be for divorce, unfortunately. It can be for adding more to a family, so pregnancy and more children, which is also stressful. It could be a job change. And so when I walk in and I’m doing this walkthrough, sometimes I sense anxiety and a lot of it.
And so one of the things that I say, especially when they’re saying no, no, no, is that it’s not your home anymore. It’s somebody else’s. And you just have to find that person. So you need to start emotionally detaching yourself from this space. And sometimes that works. Sometimes they go, I know, I know, I know. And then they start to relax.
Christan Bosley — But sometimes it’s hard. It’s just really hard to leave a house that you love. I always used to tell my clients when I was in sales to get ahead of it. I’d say, listen, if you walk into the home after it’s been staged and you have a visceral negative reaction, they’ve done a beautiful job.
(laughter)
And my clients would be like, what? And I’m like, it’s not about you. It’s about the greater buyer pool. And if you hate it, it means that they have broadened the horizons of who’s going to be attracted to the property.
Carmen Wageman — And also, but for them, that feeling of hate could also come from a place of, “I no longer have this space”.
Christan Bosley — Absolutely. It’s not my home.
Carmen Wageman — It’s not my home. I’m gone. My personality is out of this space now. I’m gone. And that’s a hard thing to walk into style. And some people love it. Oh, some people come in and go, oh my God, I could have lived like this. Can you help me with my new house? And that’s what we do.
Christan Bosley — Yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s a natural progression, which we’ll get to a little bit later, but it is interesting because I think as a realtor, if you’re not getting ahead with those conversations you may very well have a real reaction to it, and that’s normal. If you’re not prepping them for that, the amount of times they get the call from the client, get the staging out of here. I don’t like the staging company, do the staging. You must have had that many times in your career.
Carmen Wageman — It does happen. We touch so many homes in a year. So it does happen where people have a lot of negative reactions and they get voiced to us. And we try really hard with that, with the understanding of how anxiety driven the stage in their life is to make the changes as best as possible to help them feel more comfortable with the product that they’re about to put on the market.
Jessica Steinman — And she’s right. Sometimes we go back and we just change out some task lighting.
Christan Bosley — Yeah. And that’s it. And your customer service has always been exceptional.
Jessica Steinman — Move a couple things around. And what’s really interesting to see is they start a conversation with: I hate everything. And then you go in to make the changes and you augment one or two things in the house. The toss cushions or move a chair around. Or yeah, swap out one piece of art. And then it’s like, oh no, now I love it. And they don’t know what they don’t like. So they just say they like, they hate everything. I think also people look at it and they’ll look at the pieces that we’ve brought in and they would think to themselves, I wouldn’t have bought that piece. And it’s like, but you’re not buying the piece. And the reason why we put that piece in there is because it’s scaled right and it has the right color and it blends well with a couple of the other items. But they fixate on one particular piece and they go, but that, I just don’t like that dining room table chair. Can you change it out? And we go, that’s fine.
Christan Bosley — Well, I know you’ve done it because I’ll tell you, I learned to have the conversation with my sellers about disliking staging because I had so many instances of having to call Carmen and be like, my client is losing it. Will you please come and help me? And it was like, after the third time that I was like, okay, I need to find a way to get ahead of this. This is nuts.
So listen, throughout our conversation, you’ve alluded to a few times the benefit of staging in relation to the overall purchase price. We often hear from our clients and from agents that staging can lead to a higher purchase price by a certain percentage. How true is that really? And what does that percentage typically look like in your mind?
Carmen Wageman — You know, I hear a lot of numbers being thrown around, other staging companies throw out numbers. I hear numbers from RESA, which is the Stagers association, and then numbers from the US coming up. And it really varies. And I think, you know, Toronto is a very unique market as well, you can’t compare us to anything in the US at all. And so this is just based on my experience, my almost 25 years experience.
I personally think it adds anywhere between 10 and 20%. And it can add more and it can add less. And I think it depends on where it is in the city, because I do believe there’s a lot of pockets and little micro markets throughout the city. And it also depends on how the agent treats the home as well, how they market it, when they market it too, like timing is everything as well.
So it’s difficult for us to say a staging will do this. I think we are just one little element of the overall success or failure of a house. Failure is in, you know, the perceived value and what the customer will get. But time over time, over time, I see customers coming back to us and say things like, I wouldn’t have got that extra 100,000 or 200,000 or one time 1 million over asking. And so it just depends on the time of year and it depends on the market conditions. Right now, with the market being the way that it is, sometimes the value is just getting the house sold.
Christan Bosley — Absolutely.
Carmen Wageman — And so there’s a lot of value in having your house staged just to make it more desirable, even if you’re just trying to break even. Breaking even is better than not getting it sold at all.
Christan Bosley — Well, to your point, presentation is a huge part of what makes a property saleable.
Carmen Wageman — Yeah, exactly. I mean, certainly it’s worth the investment in a difficult market. Right, and so I look at it and go, so if you’re paying between $5,000 and $10,000 for a staging, I personally don’t believe that it adds $5,000 to $10,000. No. No, so where can you put $5,000 in an investment and get double your money in a day? Nowhere, right? So this is- It’s way more than double your money.
Christan Bosley — Oh, I know. I’m just gonna say, my husband and I might have almost divorced over my staging, but I will tell you unequivocally, I’m one of those people who can tell you, flat out, we made $100,000 from that staging and it probably cost us six. So this is what I tell people over and over and over, it’s like, you won’t just double your money when people ask me, am I gonna make my money back? And it’s hard to say, like 10 times. And they’re like, what? Yeah. 20 times.
I can say it concretely because I know, and I don’t know if you remember my furniture, but I had someone from a different culture purchase my home, and they would not have ever walked into my home with the furniture the way it was. Just not culturally in alignment, right? Wouldn’t have purchased it. So I think there’s a lot of value in that, but yes, it is, can be 10 times, 20 times your investment.
But so when you’re talking about the investment, obviously there is a very dramatic range of price points if you’re looking at a one-bedroom condo to a luxury lifestyle home, but on average, what is the typical investment when it comes to staging?
Carmen Wageman — So we get the question a lot, and we get the question tied to, my property is whatever square footage, give me a number. And we like to say, every home in Toronto, whether it be a house or a condo or what have you, is unique, every single one, because the bare bones are unique or the built-ins that they’ve added are different, or it can be a number of different things. Even the furniture that they have or the items in the property that they have are different.
Jessica Steinman — And we, as Carmen was saying, like to utilize as much of the property that’s already on the property as possible. So yes, your condo is 600 square feet or it’s a three-bedroom townhouse or what have you, but each property is unique. So what we’re gonna bring in, what we’re going to recommend to you, the price of your staging is gonna be wildly different than the comparables down the street. On average, empty three-bedroom townhouse could be anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000, but that is such a wide range because of what we can utilize within the property if there’s more windows than wall spaces, so there’s more art needed or more shelving, so there’s more accessorizing required.
So we really like to get a feel for the space before we get a ballpark. So we can do quotes based on photos and floor plans just to get an idea going. So one thing that I find agents confused by is, so we’ll do a small condo, but it’s a two-bedroom condo. And so it needs a bed and two end tables, might need an area rug, and then there’ll be a living room setting, and there’ll be a kitchen setting, there may be a dining room setting, and then a little office, a little den. So you add all of those pieces of furniture up and you get a quote. And then there’s a service. And our service is pretty much the same. It depends, like if we’re doing a small condo, even if we’re doing a small condo, there is a bit higher of a service fee because there’s elevators and it does take us longer to bring it up and down.
So it might be the same as a larger home, the service fees. But then you go to a larger home. The same agent gives us another property and he goes, why this home is 5,000 square feet is the quote, the same as the quote that you gave me for that tiny little condo. And it’s like, because we brought in the same amount of furniture.
Yeah. So, and our furniture, when you’re staging with us, if we’re bringing in a $2,000 accent chair — that you love.
Christan Bosley — I’m taking this home. I hope we all know this.
Jessica Steinman — Or we’re bringing in a $1,000 accent chair. We actually charge the same. Yeah. Not in our rental business. Which makes sense. But it’s the same. Yeah, a chair is a chair.
Christan Bosley — It’s roughly the same amount.
Jessica Steinman — Yeah, it’s roughly the same amount. So that’s what the confusion is when the agents are looking at different houses and saying, why was this more and why was this less? And it’s just like, just add up the furniture. It’s based on the items that we’re bringing, right? Like it’s not the square footage. So it’s not items that we’re bringing in that we’re charging for. It’s not the type of house or the size of the house. It’s what type of furniture we have to bring in or the quantity of furniture. The quantity of furniture.
Christan Bosley — Okay. So for homeowners that may not be selling but want to refresh, I know that we all come across these individuals. What is the one quick win that you recommend that makes the biggest impact?
Carmen Wageman — Paint. 100% paint. Paint. Paint, paint, paint, paint. Freshly painted house. Walls, ceiling, trim. If you repaint your house, and I’m not talking about whitewashing your house it’s all one color. I’m talking about color blocking behind your master bed, for instance. A really great color that’s maybe tied into your linens or something. That can transform your room and make you feel like it’s a designed room like that. And paint is inexpensive. And if you paint it yourself, it’s even more inexpensive.
Christan Bosley — Right.
Carmen Wageman — The next level would be changing your lighting out.
Christan Bosley — Okay.
Carmen Wageman — Going to a lighting store and changing out some key pieces of lighting. That can really change even just the style of your home too. It can make it feel urban chic or it can be glitzy or however, whatever mood you’re in it can, or design style you want to project. You can do that through lighting. It can be expensive though.
So if that’s not something somebody wants to take on, then I would say toss cushions and area rugs. They’re very inexpensive and it can absolutely refresh a room. Make you feel different.
Christan Bosley — I have to just say that my toss cushions were outrageously expensive. I do not understand why.
Carmen Wageman — Where are you buying them?
Christan Bosley — I don’t know. I won’t be buying them there again. I know that.
Carmen Wageman — They can run you, you know, I mean, there’s places like HomeSense for instance, that have some great deals, great toss cushions. Most of them are not great. You have to be able to have an eye and be able to pick out some things, but they’ll run you less than 50, $60. But then you can spend $200 to $300 per pillow. Easy.
Christan Bosley — Right? Easy. Like blink of an eye. I was like, what’s happening? Yeah. How did we get here? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, enough of my complaining. So Carmen, where do you think staging is headed? What’s next for you?
Carmen Wageman — Well, staging I think is still going to continue along the same line. I think there’s going to be additions to or compliments to stagings. Like we are already seeing virtual staging and I think virtual staging is great. I think it adds, can add to the sale of a home, but you have to be very careful with it as well.
So for instance, an unfinished basement, have that finished and show the potential of the home, have the backyard or the front yard landscaped in a way that can make people excited about a future project if they take this house on and the potential of that project.
But I think when somebody is investing in a home and they’re going to live there, not as an investment, but actually live there, to walk into a space that’s empty is a letdown, no matter how beautiful it looks online.
And a house will always feel, or a room will always feel smaller when it’s unfinished anyways. So they feel a little duped. So I would say I don’t see, and I hope it doesn’t happen, I don’t see virtual stagings overtaking traditional stagings. I see stagings continuing to elevate as hopefully companies like ours continue to raise the bar on ourselves and create spaces that evolve with the time and add a sense of luxury wherever we can.
So we use high-end furniture wherever we can, which does make the house feel more expensive, and we hope that our industry follows our lead and continues to do that as well. And I hear AI might come into play. Some people were talking about people putting on glasses and walking in, and then they can see the rooms, and if they want to maybe change the room from traditional to super modern, they can do that. But again, I think when you’re buying a house, you want to sit on something and talk to your agent and look around and absorb the room and see if this is the right space. Imagine yourself sitting there and living there. I don’t think you can do that with…
Christan Bosley — I’m gonna briefly comment on that. So I’m not sure if you know, but we have a pre-construction arm called Property Link, and the very basis of Property Link is actually 3D designing through AI, through visuals on the goggles, what their space could look like they could go in, they can change their paint colors, they can change their fixtures, they can put the furniture in.
I can tell you unequivocally, it’s a great idea. It doesn’t sell homes, right? You know what sells homes are people and tactile touch feel. And emotion.
Carmen Wageman — Absolutely.
Christan Bosley — You’re not getting that from goggles.
Carmen Wageman — No. Yeah. And who really buys the house is the woman.
Christan Bosley — Yeah. Or is the final decision maker. Absolutely true.
Carmen Wageman — And so you want to make sure that you appeal to them because that’s their nest, and they’ll want to touch and feel the nest. And so I think traditional staging is still going to continue on, and I just hope that the industry continues to elevate and not go in for the cheap and cheerful look of what we see sometimes, which I think has a disservice to the industry.
Christan Bosley — Absolutely. And I think the next couple of years we’ll be telling too whether or not that actually happens, because I’m of the opinion that the market that we’re in right now is actually just a normal market. We’re all so accustomed to a market that’s going up at a huge trajectory, which is not normal or sustainable. Right. And so I believe that- Or good for anybody. No, no. I don’t think it’s healthy. So I believe that where we are right now is where we are going to be for the next three to five years.
And it’s interesting to me watching where people are already cutting corners, cutting costs, saving the different companies that are creating different things. So hopefully they continue to elevate, but I think we’ll see what happens over the short term probably.
Carmen Wageman — Right.
Christan Bosley — But let’s talk about how you’re elevating. You have some exciting things coming in September.
Carmen Wageman — Well, so yes, so that actually, that’s a really good approach, dovetail approach to this, because if an agent is finding it more challenging to accommodate the price points of what staging has become, the cost of what staging has become, many of the agents out there want to try to do it themselves.
And actually, before I came into this industry, agents were doing it themselves. They had garages filled with linens and tables and coffee tables that they would throw in their car and bring, I know this, because they would tell me all the time that that’s…
Christan Bosley — I used to do it. I used to have lamps and things. It’s exhausting. I think it’s- We’re not stagers.
Carmen Wageman — I’m just saying, like, there are some people that are skilled enough to do it, I think there are pockets where it can be done, because many stagers don’t want to come out or their base fees are such that it doesn’t warrant them, nobody wants to pay them to come and make the beds and dress the beds up and maybe throw in a few pieces of art and a couple end tables.
And so this is where I think, where we can help agents gain some confidence and some knowledge. We rent furniture now, not just to our own client base, but to anybody who wants to rent furniture, art, accessories, linens, whatever you need. We have everything online and you can come and rent directly from us. Where that applies to real estate agents is we can help them without utilizing our services. We will help you create a room. If you send us a picture in the dimensions, we’ll say, well, this sofa and these pieces would work really well. We can package it up. We can ship it to you. And all the agent would have to do is throw some toss cushions, which they can rent from us as well.
So we’re finding that agents want to learn more about how to do it themselves. And so we have a school coming out. It’ll be a three-part course. The first course will be just completely lecture-based on all the tips and rules and things that I’ve learned and shortcuts and things.
And then the second one will be part lecture, part hands-on.
And then the third one is full day of just staging. And it will be in our showroom where we have little vignettes all set up.
Christan Bosley — You know what I love about that is you always know that you have a very strong business when you’re prepared to teach people how to do what you do. That you’re not threatened by other people coming in and taking over because you’re confident in what you do and what you have to offer and that there will always be a market for your service. That’s inspiring in itself to me personally.
So well done, congratulations. I’ll look forward to hopefully participating in that just because my own house is a disaster.
Carmen Wageman — Thank you. There are quite a few people who want to take the course just so that they can use it in their own house.
Christan Bosley — Right, exactly, exactly. I can never figure out my bookcase. I need to understand the strategy around that.
Okay, beautiful. So I’m a sucker for a good before and after. Any standout dramatic transformational stories?
Carmen Wageman — The transformations that I love are the ones where I’ll go in and the people are just done with the house. They’re not moving for any other reason other than they just don’t like the house. And so I’ll come in and I’ll make some pretty big, one in particular, it was a three bedroom condo on Cumberland Penthouse. And she made it into a one bedroom and another room just being a dressing room.
So I made her make it back into a two bedroom which is not insignificant work to do the wall has to go up and everything. And she had pillars and I had her remove the pillars. And she had fired three designers trying to get that condo to a point where what she wanted and she just never loved it. And so I come in and I go, okay, it’s fine, fine, fine. Now she stepped back. She’s gonna let me do whatever I want.
So I pull out some of her furniture, not all of it, but some of her furniture and we put in our furniture, redo all the art and she’s walking around with her son on the phone and she’s showing him the house. She’s going, I love it, I love it, I love it. And he says, then why are you selling? And so she took it off the market. Okay, three designers later. Three designers later. And I think it’s because she let me do what I wanted to do and she wasn’t in the way. Yeah, right. And so she just, and so she did. She absolutely took it off the market, stayed there for another two years and then the real estate agent, I think was not happy with me.
So she hired another staging company to come in and stage the house. And this is where I’ll pat myself on the back because the homeowner hated it, but they still went on the market and it didn’t sell. And then she called me up and said, can you come and redo this? Right. And then I did and then it sold.
So that’s what transformations can do. It’s not about just putting in furniture and toss cushion, it’s the right furniture and the right art and the right style that can make people inspired to buy.
Christan Bosley — Amazing, I love that. Do you have a transformational story?
Jessica Steinman — That one’s my favorite by far. I mean, we do moments where, or we do stagings where the people walk through. We had one recently where she walks through and she just kept gushing, oh my goodness, oh my goodness. And she just kept getting louder and louder every time she went in the room. And we don’t normally get to hear those moments. Because we’re long gone. We’re long gone at that point. We only hear it if the house sells and then, or if we need to come back because there’s a question, a concern, a comment, the dislike moment.
We don’t get the wow of the client and the excitement of the client. So we did one stage, it was you and me actually. We don’t normally go on stagings. And so we did one ourselves and we were there when the client walked in and it was just her excitement and her joy was just so there. And so those are the ones, those are the before and afters. Where the house was fine before. It wasn’t prepared for sale. But when we got it there, the joy that it brought her. So we’ll get homes and I’ll do a…
Carmen Wageman — We’ve done a lot of walkthroughs in houses and some of the houses are not, they don’t present well. And you’ll walk around.
Christan Bosley — You’re very diplomatic, Carmen.
Carmen Wageman — And yes, I’ve learned. I’ve learned. So you’re walking around and you’re going, and you walk out of the house and I sometimes I’ll get in my car and I’ll go, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with this house? And I’ll come back and I’ll share it with everybody. And you wouldn’t believe the house that I just saw.
And then we’ll go back and they’ll have done what we’ve asked them to do. They’ll have painted and they’ll have cleaned and they’ll have removed all of their furniture. And then we’ll come in and we’ll do the job and we’ll stand back. And so we don’t hear what they say because they’re coming later, but we’ll stand back and we’ll go, I’d buy this house. This is the moment that brings you joy. We know, we know, we’ve done well. We’ve done well. When we go, yeah, this is a cool house. And it always surprises me.
And I know, because I can see past a lot of that stuff, but it’s not until it’s actually done that you stand back and you go, wow, this is hot. This looks good. And that’s when we get really excited. But then when we hear the clients say it too, that’s when we get goosebumps. And we’re walking around like, I love this. I love what we do.
Christan Bosley — Before we go, I have a couple of kind of rapid fire questions of just things that interest me selfishly that I wanna know about you. So number one, what brings you joy outside of your jobs?
Carmen Wageman — Cycling.
Christan Bosley — Cycling.
Carmen Wageman — Yeah, it’s my meditative space. It’s my happy place. Yeah. Yes. Tour through France. Tour through France. I actually do the Tour de France, so yes. It’s amazing.
Christan Bosley — Congratulations.
Carmen Wageman — Yeah, thanks.
Christan Bosley — Jessica?
Jessica Steinman — I’m a really big reader. I’m an avid reader. So I like to read. I like to collect books. So I’m very on the literary side of the world.
Christan Bosley — Well, believe it or not, that actually was my next question, Jessica. So you’re an avid reader. Are we talking like fiction, business?
Jessica Steinman — I am definitely more of a fiction reader. I definitely like to explore other perspectives that don’t have to relate to the day-to-day stress that I deal with. Every once in a while, I’ll pick up a nonfiction self-help business book, but the audio book on my way home is definitely a fiction novel.
Christan Bosley — Okay, amazing. So what book is on your current reading list?
Jessica Steinman — I currently just finished The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. So it’s a World War II.
Christan Bosley — Kristin Hannah is a beautiful author, right? She can spin a tale. She can make you believe that you’re back in any time that you have.
Jessica Steinman — So I’ve been going through her whole collection. So I just finished The Nightingale. I’ve read like three or four of her books. Yeah, she’s great. They’re awesome. I love them.
Christan Bosley — We have a book club at the office.
Jessica Steinman — Oh, fun.
Christan Bosley — And like quite a few people participate in it, but we read all business and mindset, psychology books, all that kind of fun stuff.
Do you enjoy reading, Carmen?
Carmen Wageman — I do, but I don’t have a lot of time. So I actually, I write more than I read. And so I’m currently writing two books right now. One is more of a personal book of the journey that I’ve been on. And then another one is going to be on, well, it is actually because it’s part of the school. But it will be a how to stage on, and the premise will be directed towards real estate agents. And so I’m more of a writer than I am a reader.
Christan Bosley — This is really exciting. I would really like to read your personal book. OK, yeah. Thank you.
What is one lesson you’ve learned in your career that you wish you knew earlier?
Jessica Steinman — Do you want to go first?
Carmen Wageman — Well, you go first, while I think of the answer.
Jessica Steinman — So I started after the company was already grown. Everything was already in place, and I’m coming right out of school. So I had to learn over the last seven years that every real estate agent, they’re negotiators. They are professional negotiators. Their bread and butter is to get the best deal possible for their clients. And I had to learn that saying no was perfectly OK, and that I can make a counter offer at all times.
So just because someone’s asking does not mean that the best customer service is saying yes. And she did not learn that from me. She brought that to the table, actually, because I was honest. I learned the opposite from you. And then she was like, oh, no. So yes, that was brilliant. So that’s what I learned.
Carmen Wageman — She’s brilliant at this.
Jessica Steinman — Well, thank you. Yeah, I’ve learned that the hard way. But yeah, that’s the main thing that I brought to the table in our dynamic. And yeah, that’s it.
Christan Bosley — OK, it’s a good lesson. It’s a good lesson, yeah. I personally love negotiating, so I think it’s kind of fun. OK, Carmen?
Carmen Wageman — So it’s a tough question, because I’ve just been through so much over time. I think if I were to go back and talk to the younger version of myself, I would tell her to just believe that it’s going to be OK, that every decision that you make, whether it succeeds or doesn’t succeed, you will learn from it and be able to navigate in the right direction.
And so everything that we do and every time we go, let’s do this, whether we win or lose, it’s a learning experience for us, and it’s a lesson. And I think what we’re doing is we’re trailblazers.
Christan Bosley — Absolutely.
Carmen Wageman — Yeah, and I think when you do that, you fail, and you succeed, and you burn through money stupidly because of these mistakes that you made. But then you go, OK, well, I’m not going to do that. But I think we’re strong enough to do this. And so I think the journey is not over. I think we have a lot more to offer this industry, and I’m happy to explore all of that.
Christan Bosley — OK, last rapid-fire question. If you did a TED Talk, what would it be on?
Carmen Wageman — Showing up.
Christan Bosley — Showing up, which is why you don’t need a business coach.
Christan Bosley — Jessica?
Jessica Steinman — I don’t think I would have a TED Talk. I think I’d be helping produce her TED Talk, and I think that’s why we work so well together. I am definitely more behind the camera to the person.
Christan Bosley — Maybe writing fiction.
Jessica Steinman — Maybe writing fiction.
Christan Bosley — There you go. OK. I love that. Listen, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been so wonderful to learn your insights, and of course, to share your gorgeous space.
Carmen Wageman — You’re very welcome.
Christan Bosley — Really appreciate it. And until next time, I’m Christan Bosley. This has been Like a Bos. Take care.
Announcer — Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might find it valuable. We’ve got more conversations coming your way with incredible guests across design, finance, wellness, tech, and more, all through the lens of real estate. A special thank you to our set design sponsors, Stage Right.
The Mother-Daughter Duo Transforming Spaces
Set for Success: The September 2025 Bosley Podcast
We were thrilled to participate in Christan Bosley’s “Like a Bos” podcast this September. Christan dropped by Stage Right with her crew and we spent an enjoyable 50 minutes talking about where the market is, where it’s going, and how a staging business needs to work to thrive.
Enjoy!
Speaker List:
Like a Bos — Beyond the Sale
In this episode, we take a look at home staging through the lens of a family-run business. You’ll hear how smart, intentional staging can shape buyer perception, create emotional connection, and help homes sell faster.
We’ll dive into real-life transformations, generational takes on design, and where the industry is headed, all while highlighting the unique dynamic of a mother-daughter duo.
If you’d like to hear more “Like a Bos” podcasts with Christan Bosley, you can find the full series on Apple and Spotify or on the Like a Bos podcast site.
Podcast Transcript
Christan Bosley —
When a home feels just right, there is generally a team behind it. And in this case, it’s family. On today’s episode of Like a Bos, I’m joined by a mother-daughter duo who have been styling Toronto homes since 2002. We dive into the psychology of staging, generational design perspectives, and of course, how to make buyers fall in love at first sight.
Announcer —
For nearly a century, Bosley has been helping to shape the landscape of Canadian real estate. This podcast is an extension of that legacy, our way of staying connected to what matters most to you. Join us as we sit down with leading voices from across the industry and beyond to explore the ideas, trends, and stories that move real estate forward. Whether you’re an agent, investor, homeowner, or just curious about the market, there’s something here for you.
Christan Bosley —
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Like a Bos. I am your host, Christan Bosley, president and broker of record of Bosley Real Estate. This, of course, is the podcast where we bring you real conversations with people shaping the real estate industry. Today, we welcome Carmen and Jessica from Stage Right.
Carmen Wageman —
Hi.
Jessica Steinman —
Hi.
Christan Bosley —
Thank you so much for joining us today. So I had the privilege of meeting Carmen way back in the day, perhaps 2007, when I started in real estate sales. So we have a very long history of helping each other. And of course, over time, we’ve become more integrated into the brokerage aspect and some of the great things that you guys are doing here. So I’m looking forward to talking about it today. Very exciting.
Carmen Wageman —
And welcome to our space.
Christan Bosley —
Thank you. Important to note that Stage Right stages all of our podcast space, and we are so fortunate to be in your space today. So thank you.
Carmen Wageman —
My pleasure.
Christan Bosley —
All right, so Carmen, let’s start at the very beginning. You obviously founded this company. What was it that really got yourself into wanting to go in that direction?
Carmen Wageman —
So I was designing at the time. I had never heard of staging. I don’t even think staging was the word to describe what we do at the time. I think it was called something else. And I was actually helping a friend buy a house. She was living in Boston part-time and her husband asked me to look at houses with him and tell him whether or not he should show her the house.
And so the agent overheard me saying, no, this house won’t be good. You can’t put the furniture in this area or this area is too small. Where are you going put your TV? And so she started to get a feel that perhaps I could help her with some of her listings.
And so one day she just called me out of the blue and said, I have a house and it needs furniture. Can you help me? And I was a little blown away. I was like, how could I help you do that? And she says, well, there’s rental companies but I need you to go and pick it and help me get this house dressed. And that was the very beginning and that was in 2002.
And then because I did such a good job with her, the people in her agency said, oh, can I have her number? And then it just went from there. And we’ve never advertised. It just — word of mouth. It was all word of mouth.
Christan Bosley —
Amazing.
Carmen Wageman —
The only advertising we’ve ever done is on our trucks.
Christan Bosley —
So can I ask just for curiosity sake, 2002, were you kind of like young child, teenage years?
Jessica Steinman —
So 2002 I was in grade two.
Christan Bosley —
Grade two. Okay. So you’ve had the privilege of most of your life watching your mom build this.
Jessica Steinman —
Yeah, I’ve grown up with her starting it off with rental companies, her realizing that the real money is in renting. So her starting to purchase furniture in and store it in our garage and then her starting to really get into staging and her getting very popular to the point where I started coming home and there were furniture pieces missing. And I went to my mom, like mom, can you stop renting the dining chairs?
Carmen Wageman —
One day she came to me. One day she came to me and she says, you’re not going to rent our beds, are you? She was afraid she was going to come home from school and get ready for bed and she’d be sleeping on the floor or something. Yes. I did pillage from my own house in the beginning.
Christan Bosley —
Well, everybody has to do things to get started. That’s right. Amazing. Jessica, at what point did you decide to join the business?
Jessica Steinman —
I joined in 2017. I was right out of university. I just had finished my degree in psychology and I was trying to figure out my next steps in life. And Carmen was like, hey, if you want to come help me out for a little bit while you’re figuring out your next steps, I could use some help. And I just haven’t left. Carved my little section out.
Christan Bosley —
Correct me if I’m wrong. I too have a degree in psychology. Have you found it helpful in the family business dynamic?
Jessica Steinman —
I, so I say kinda, but if you ask Carmen, she always compliments my customer service and my way of understanding situations and communications — she definitely sees the degree come out.
Christan Bosley —
So it sounds like it was more of a natural transition for you, not necessarily requiring any convincing.
Carmen Wageman —
No. There was no intention for her to stay.
Jessica Steinman —
No, it was kinda like I walked in to just lend a hand for a couple of months, just support. And then I started finding areas that I thought that I could help improve and change and support. And then I’d bring those ideas up and Carmen kept saying, well then go for it. Just do it. I don’t have the time. So if you see an area that you can make more efficient or change so that we would then earn more money, go for it. And I just kept going until I created that kind of job in this company and carved my space out.
Carmen Wageman —
And so Jessica does all the operations. And she can move into the design portion, although that’s not what she loves to do, but in a pinch, she could stage, she can do all these things.
Jessica Steinman —
When Carmen has gone away or been sick, I’ll step in, I can do a staging, I can do a walkthrough. I’m on all of our design jobs as well. But my love is in the operation, business, finance side of the company.
Carmen Wageman — 00:06:50
Which is not my love.
Christan Bosley —
Carmen was giving me a tour of your incredible warehouse. Incredible, by the way. And she did kind of offhandedly mention that you were a little bit type A. So I’m not surprised to hear that you’re in operations because you need that for operations and execution, right? And it is a very, it’s like left versus right side brain. Creative operations, like very different skill sets. So I can see why the partnership has been so successful.
Carmen Wageman —
Oh yeah. Ying and yang.
Christan Bosley —
Oh yeah, good way to put it. So I mean, as someone who has spent my entire life growing up in a family business, one of the things that I have always kind of paid attention to is boundaries between personal and professional. In my family, there were none. Do you have any boundaries between the two of you?
Carmen Wageman —
You go first.
Jessica Steinman —
You go first.
(laughter)
Carmen Wageman —
I think we have learned boundaries over the last seven years. And I think as we age together in this business, we’ve learned not to bring personal problems into work. Even though we’re mother daughter, we keep that outside of work. I think that has helped us quite a bit to work together. We’re all work here and then outside of work. I would like to say we’re all personal outside of work, but that never, we do talk about work on the outside, but I think that’s because she loves what she does and I love what I do. So we do talk about work on, but sometimes we’ll say, let’s put a pin in it. We’re sick of it.
Jessica Steinman —
Or our husbands say that.
Carmen Wageman —
Or our husbands say that, yeah. Enough, enough, let’s talk about something else.
Jessica Steinman —
But yeah. But we try very hard to make that distinction. So I’ll call her in work settings, Carmen, rather than mom. And then when we’re talking about personal things. So I try very hard, even just the language that I use, to set up a boundary to recognize how we should be talking to each other and what we’re talking about in our communication styles. And we try very hard.
Carmen Wageman —
And when we were designing the space that we work in right now, we took everything back to the studs and rebuilt it and rebuilt our offices. And we chose to not put a wall in between our office and just to share an office too. So not only are we at work together, we actually share an office together as well.
Jessica Steinman —
Yeah, we spend a lot of time together.
Carmen Wageman —
But to be fair, I am out a lot. Like I do a lot of the walkthroughs, especially in the busy season.
Jessica Steinman —
It’s my office when we’re in the busy season, yeah.
Christan Bosley —
Okay, I love that. So Carmen, you’ve been in the industry for a while, obviously, 2002 you said. How have you seen staging evolve between then and now? Because your business has adapted a lot, right?
Carmen Wageman —
Sure, it’s mostly evolved just in that it’s mainstream now. When I started, people, when I would do a walkthrough, people didn’t quite understand why I was there. And so when I was talking about replacing furniture, they were like, what? What are you talking about? People aren’t buying my furniture, they’re buying the house. And so I had to explain to them the value of the service and get them to understand why they were spending money to prepare the home. And I have been escorted out of the house a few times with some of the things that I would recommend because they would get so offended.
And, but now thanks to HGTV and all the programs that are on about house transformations and how quickly it can happen, and even just the little things. And I think people started to get into that mindset that you can improve a house like that. And so it’s been unique for me to watch it go from, I don’t know, just one or two stagings a week to three stagings a day during the busy season, up to four a day. And how everybody’s doing it and how a lot of agents are offering it as part of their service.
Christan Bosley —
Are you seeing that shift now? I’m just wondering with the market shifting, are you seeing that shift? There are a lot of realtors who are not putting that in their package anymore, right? Are you seeing that across the board or?
Carmen Wageman —
Not putting it in their package as part of the fees?
Christan Bosley —
Yeah, not as part of their fees package because properties are sitting on the market longer, the market shifted a bit.
Jessica Steinman —
So it’s hard, right? Because when we ask for payment, it’s either the agent paying or the client paying, but we don’t know what is done after the house is sold. So I say it’s about 50-50 split between the client paying versus the agent paying, but then I don’t know what they do later, right?
Christan Bosley —
Yeah, we’re seeing that too. That’s something that we’re seeing for sure with our agents and I would say market-wide. So let’s talk about your approach. When a seller agent brings you in, what’s your process on that first walkthrough to the final kind of reveal for the client?
Carmen Wageman —
I guess my approach is the first thing that I ask is, when are you going on the market? Because what I recommend will be impacted on whether or not they have time. Sometimes we’ll walk in and they’ll say, well, we want to be on the market next week. And I’ll look at the house and it may need a lot of work, but now because we don’t have time to do that work, my job is to redirect attention away from the deficiencies and onto the beauty and what it can look like.
And so I go maybe in a little bit deeper into replacing some of the furniture and maybe some of the lighting to brighten the space up. Most of the time people want to walk through with me and hear what I have to say. And over the years, I’ve been able to massage what I say and I say it in such a way that I now get the, “you don’t have to be kind. I know what my house looks like. I just want to make money, just tell me what to do”. But I’m still very gentle with the homeowners because staging is about creating a mass appeal and it’s not about critiquing somebody’s taste.
And so I’m just there to make sure that the furniture is the right scale for the space, the room, which would make the room feel as big as it can. Does it have as much lighting in the space? Do we need to change the color out in order to brighten the space? And does the house feel fresh and new? And so new could be the furniture. The furniture that we bring in adds that refresh. And so the kitchen can be dated, but if the furniture all around it is all new, it actually lifts that kitchen up.
Jessica Steinman —
So once she’s done her walkthrough, she’ll give us the quote and the notes to relay to the client. And then we’ll schedule a staging date and we’ll arrive on site. So the client will then see us next, you know, early afternoon on the day of the staging. But we have already, you know, a couple of days in advance, picked everything, created the design. And then the morning of we’re pulling it all together, making changes as needed, adding more in. So we’re really working on the staging in the morning. And then we do the installation in the afternoon. So even though they’ve only seen us in the afternoon for a couple of hours, we’ve been really working towards the goal, the design that Carmen has been explaining during the walkthrough.
So by five o’clock, there’s a wow moment happens where we can walk everybody through at the end of the transformation. And they can see the house that they’re about to list right at the very end.
Christan Bosley —
Amazing. I know Carmen that you mentioned that you’re a little delicate. And of course, staging is about presenting the home and not critiquing the style, which I think is the most impactful sentence. Really, really great sentence to teach realtors to use as well. But so what are some of the key conversations you need to have upfront with some of the sellers if they’re feeling hesitant or unsure about staging?
Carmen Wageman —
Well, one of the first things that I tell them is that I’m really here to just make you money. I’m here to give your house the best shot at making the most money. And I think a lot of people’s homes are their largest investment. And so that’s music to their ears, is that somebody’s there to help them with that investment.
But then they also, I also add to that, that I endeavored to use everything I possibly can within the home that is currently there. So I’m not a type of stager that wants everything out and I’ll redo the whole house. I want the house to feel designed, loved and lived in, and not sterilize it. So if there are pieces in there that do not need to be removed — and there’s a huge hassle to doing staging, to removing things, finding storage for it and all that. It’s very expensive to remove a lot of those items. If I can use them, I will. And I find that stagings actually look better when we add gorgeous sofa and area rug and coffee table, but leave their antique pieces that were finds somewhere along the way. And that adds that realism that these people actually live here. It’s not a rented piece.
Christan Bosley —
Exactly.
Carmen Wageman —
I love leaving family photos that look like they’ve had fun on vacation, that they’re hugging and there’s kids laughing and things like that. That adds that warmth and love to a house. And nobody wants to buy a house that feels sterile. They want to buy a house that feels like a successful, happy, loving family has lived in it. And therefore they too can be that way. So that’s what we’re always trying to strive for.
But we also want to take it up, maybe just a little bit more than that, and just inspire people. Like, this is like, wow! You know? And because a well-designed house, I mean, that’s what it looks like.
Christan Bosley —
That’s what sells the buyers, to your point, right? That aspirational aspect of, oh, maybe I can actually live here. Maybe this can actually be mine, right?
Carmen Wageman —
Correct. And because most people don’t live in a house that’s fully furnished with beautiful furniture. And so of course, you know, if you do it well, which I think we do, it does that. It’s different from what they’re used to seeing when they go to friends and families in their own home.
Christan Bosley —
Yeah. Of note, Carmen had to stage my entire main floor, took all the furniture out of it, put all new furniture in it. And I will tell you that my husband and I almost divorced overstaging our home. Oh! He walked in, he was beside himself. He was like, what are we doing here? This is not our home. And I was like, yeah, this is the point that you don’t understand. It’s actually not our home anymore. We are selling it. That’s right. Wrap your head around it.
Carmen Wageman —
And that brings up a good point too, because for some people it’s a very emotional thing to sell your home. It can be for a variety of reasons too. It can be for divorce, unfortunately. It can be for adding more to a family, so pregnancy and more children, which is also stressful. It could be a job change. And so when I walk in and I’m doing this walkthrough, sometimes I sense anxiety and a lot of it.
And so one of the things that I say, especially when they’re saying no, no, no, is that it’s not your home anymore. It’s somebody else’s. And you just have to find that person. So you need to start emotionally detaching yourself from this space. And sometimes that works. Sometimes they go, I know, I know, I know. And then they start to relax.
Christan Bosley —
But sometimes it’s hard. It’s just really hard to leave a house that you love. I always used to tell my clients when I was in sales to get ahead of it. I’d say, listen, if you walk into the home after it’s been staged and you have a visceral negative reaction, they’ve done a beautiful job.
(laughter)
And my clients would be like, what? And I’m like, it’s not about you. It’s about the greater buyer pool. And if you hate it, it means that they have broadened the horizons of who’s going to be attracted to the property.
Carmen Wageman —
And also, but for them, that feeling of hate could also come from a place of, “I no longer have this space”.
Christan Bosley —
Absolutely. It’s not my home.
Carmen Wageman —
It’s not my home. I’m gone. My personality is out of this space now. I’m gone. And that’s a hard thing to walk into style. And some people love it. Oh, some people come in and go, oh my God, I could have lived like this. Can you help me with my new house? And that’s what we do.
Christan Bosley —
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s a natural progression, which we’ll get to a little bit later, but it is interesting because I think as a realtor, if you’re not getting ahead with those conversations you may very well have a real reaction to it, and that’s normal. If you’re not prepping them for that, the amount of times they get the call from the client, get the staging out of here. I don’t like the staging company, do the staging. You must have had that many times in your career.
Carmen Wageman —
It does happen. We touch so many homes in a year. So it does happen where people have a lot of negative reactions and they get voiced to us. And we try really hard with that, with the understanding of how anxiety driven the stage in their life is to make the changes as best as possible to help them feel more comfortable with the product that they’re about to put on the market.
Jessica Steinman —
And she’s right. Sometimes we go back and we just change out some task lighting.
Christan Bosley —
Yeah. And that’s it. And your customer service has always been exceptional.
Jessica Steinman —
Move a couple things around. And what’s really interesting to see is they start a conversation with: I hate everything. And then you go in to make the changes and you augment one or two things in the house. The toss cushions or move a chair around. Or yeah, swap out one piece of art. And then it’s like, oh no, now I love it. And they don’t know what they don’t like. So they just say they like, they hate everything. I think also people look at it and they’ll look at the pieces that we’ve brought in and they would think to themselves, I wouldn’t have bought that piece. And it’s like, but you’re not buying the piece. And the reason why we put that piece in there is because it’s scaled right and it has the right color and it blends well with a couple of the other items. But they fixate on one particular piece and they go, but that, I just don’t like that dining room table chair. Can you change it out? And we go, that’s fine.
Christan Bosley —
Well, I know you’ve done it because I’ll tell you, I learned to have the conversation with my sellers about disliking staging because I had so many instances of having to call Carmen and be like, my client is losing it. Will you please come and help me? And it was like, after the third time that I was like, okay, I need to find a way to get ahead of this. This is nuts.
So listen, throughout our conversation, you’ve alluded to a few times the benefit of staging in relation to the overall purchase price. We often hear from our clients and from agents that staging can lead to a higher purchase price by a certain percentage. How true is that really? And what does that percentage typically look like in your mind?
Carmen Wageman —
You know, I hear a lot of numbers being thrown around, other staging companies throw out numbers. I hear numbers from RESA, which is the Stagers association, and then numbers from the US coming up. And it really varies. And I think, you know, Toronto is a very unique market as well, you can’t compare us to anything in the US at all. And so this is just based on my experience, my almost 25 years experience.
I personally think it adds anywhere between 10 and 20%. And it can add more and it can add less. And I think it depends on where it is in the city, because I do believe there’s a lot of pockets and little micro markets throughout the city. And it also depends on how the agent treats the home as well, how they market it, when they market it too, like timing is everything as well.
So it’s difficult for us to say a staging will do this. I think we are just one little element of the overall success or failure of a house. Failure is in, you know, the perceived value and what the customer will get. But time over time, over time, I see customers coming back to us and say things like, I wouldn’t have got that extra 100,000 or 200,000 or one time 1 million over asking. And so it just depends on the time of year and it depends on the market conditions. Right now, with the market being the way that it is, sometimes the value is just getting the house sold.
Christan Bosley —
Absolutely.
Carmen Wageman —
And so there’s a lot of value in having your house staged just to make it more desirable, even if you’re just trying to break even. Breaking even is better than not getting it sold at all.
Christan Bosley —
Well, to your point, presentation is a huge part of what makes a property saleable.
Carmen Wageman —
Yeah, exactly. I mean, certainly it’s worth the investment in a difficult market. Right, and so I look at it and go, so if you’re paying between $5,000 and $10,000 for a staging, I personally don’t believe that it adds $5,000 to $10,000. No. No, so where can you put $5,000 in an investment and get double your money in a day? Nowhere, right? So this is- It’s way more than double your money.
Christan Bosley —
Oh, I know. I’m just gonna say, my husband and I might have almost divorced over my staging, but I will tell you unequivocally, I’m one of those people who can tell you, flat out, we made $100,000 from that staging and it probably cost us six. So this is what I tell people over and over and over, it’s like, you won’t just double your money when people ask me, am I gonna make my money back? And it’s hard to say, like 10 times. And they’re like, what? Yeah. 20 times.
I can say it concretely because I know, and I don’t know if you remember my furniture, but I had someone from a different culture purchase my home, and they would not have ever walked into my home with the furniture the way it was. Just not culturally in alignment, right? Wouldn’t have purchased it. So I think there’s a lot of value in that, but yes, it is, can be 10 times, 20 times your investment.
But so when you’re talking about the investment, obviously there is a very dramatic range of price points if you’re looking at a one-bedroom condo to a luxury lifestyle home, but on average, what is the typical investment when it comes to staging?
Carmen Wageman —
So we get the question a lot, and we get the question tied to, my property is whatever square footage, give me a number. And we like to say, every home in Toronto, whether it be a house or a condo or what have you, is unique, every single one, because the bare bones are unique or the built-ins that they’ve added are different, or it can be a number of different things. Even the furniture that they have or the items in the property that they have are different.
Jessica Steinman —
And we, as Carmen was saying, like to utilize as much of the property that’s already on the property as possible. So yes, your condo is 600 square feet or it’s a three-bedroom townhouse or what have you, but each property is unique. So what we’re gonna bring in, what we’re going to recommend to you, the price of your staging is gonna be wildly different than the comparables down the street. On average, empty three-bedroom townhouse could be anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000, but that is such a wide range because of what we can utilize within the property if there’s more windows than wall spaces, so there’s more art needed or more shelving, so there’s more accessorizing required.
So we really like to get a feel for the space before we get a ballpark. So we can do quotes based on photos and floor plans just to get an idea going. So one thing that I find agents confused by is, so we’ll do a small condo, but it’s a two-bedroom condo. And so it needs a bed and two end tables, might need an area rug, and then there’ll be a living room setting, and there’ll be a kitchen setting, there may be a dining room setting, and then a little office, a little den. So you add all of those pieces of furniture up and you get a quote. And then there’s a service. And our service is pretty much the same. It depends, like if we’re doing a small condo, even if we’re doing a small condo, there is a bit higher of a service fee because there’s elevators and it does take us longer to bring it up and down.
So it might be the same as a larger home, the service fees. But then you go to a larger home. The same agent gives us another property and he goes, why this home is 5,000 square feet is the quote, the same as the quote that you gave me for that tiny little condo. And it’s like, because we brought in the same amount of furniture.
Yeah. So, and our furniture, when you’re staging with us, if we’re bringing in a $2,000 accent chair — that you love.
Christan Bosley —
I’m taking this home. I hope we all know this.
Jessica Steinman —
Or we’re bringing in a $1,000 accent chair. We actually charge the same. Yeah. Not in our rental business. Which makes sense. But it’s the same. Yeah, a chair is a chair.
Christan Bosley —
It’s roughly the same amount.
Jessica Steinman —
Yeah, it’s roughly the same amount. So that’s what the confusion is when the agents are looking at different houses and saying, why was this more and why was this less? And it’s just like, just add up the furniture. It’s based on the items that we’re bringing, right? Like it’s not the square footage. So it’s not items that we’re bringing in that we’re charging for. It’s not the type of house or the size of the house. It’s what type of furniture we have to bring in or the quantity of furniture. The quantity of furniture.
Christan Bosley —
Okay. So for homeowners that may not be selling but want to refresh, I know that we all come across these individuals. What is the one quick win that you recommend that makes the biggest impact?
Carmen Wageman —
Paint. 100% paint. Paint. Paint, paint, paint, paint. Freshly painted house. Walls, ceiling, trim. If you repaint your house, and I’m not talking about whitewashing your house it’s all one color. I’m talking about color blocking behind your master bed, for instance. A really great color that’s maybe tied into your linens or something. That can transform your room and make you feel like it’s a designed room like that. And paint is inexpensive. And if you paint it yourself, it’s even more inexpensive.
Christan Bosley —
Right.
Carmen Wageman —
The next level would be changing your lighting out.
Christan Bosley —
Okay.
Carmen Wageman —
Going to a lighting store and changing out some key pieces of lighting. That can really change even just the style of your home too. It can make it feel urban chic or it can be glitzy or however, whatever mood you’re in it can, or design style you want to project. You can do that through lighting. It can be expensive though.
So if that’s not something somebody wants to take on, then I would say toss cushions and area rugs. They’re very inexpensive and it can absolutely refresh a room. Make you feel different.
Christan Bosley —
I have to just say that my toss cushions were outrageously expensive. I do not understand why.
Carmen Wageman —
Where are you buying them?
Christan Bosley —
I don’t know. I won’t be buying them there again. I know that.
Carmen Wageman —
They can run you, you know, I mean, there’s places like HomeSense for instance, that have some great deals, great toss cushions. Most of them are not great. You have to be able to have an eye and be able to pick out some things, but they’ll run you less than 50, $60. But then you can spend $200 to $300 per pillow. Easy.
Christan Bosley —
Right? Easy. Like blink of an eye. I was like, what’s happening? Yeah. How did we get here? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, enough of my complaining. So Carmen, where do you think staging is headed? What’s next for you?
Carmen Wageman —
Well, staging I think is still going to continue along the same line. I think there’s going to be additions to or compliments to stagings. Like we are already seeing virtual staging and I think virtual staging is great. I think it adds, can add to the sale of a home, but you have to be very careful with it as well.
So for instance, an unfinished basement, have that finished and show the potential of the home, have the backyard or the front yard landscaped in a way that can make people excited about a future project if they take this house on and the potential of that project.
But I think when somebody is investing in a home and they’re going to live there, not as an investment, but actually live there, to walk into a space that’s empty is a letdown, no matter how beautiful it looks online.
And a house will always feel, or a room will always feel smaller when it’s unfinished anyways. So they feel a little duped. So I would say I don’t see, and I hope it doesn’t happen, I don’t see virtual stagings overtaking traditional stagings. I see stagings continuing to elevate as hopefully companies like ours continue to raise the bar on ourselves and create spaces that evolve with the time and add a sense of luxury wherever we can.
So we use high-end furniture wherever we can, which does make the house feel more expensive, and we hope that our industry follows our lead and continues to do that as well. And I hear AI might come into play. Some people were talking about people putting on glasses and walking in, and then they can see the rooms, and if they want to maybe change the room from traditional to super modern, they can do that. But again, I think when you’re buying a house, you want to sit on something and talk to your agent and look around and absorb the room and see if this is the right space. Imagine yourself sitting there and living there. I don’t think you can do that with…
Christan Bosley —
I’m gonna briefly comment on that. So I’m not sure if you know, but we have a pre-construction arm called Property Link, and the very basis of Property Link is actually 3D designing through AI, through visuals on the goggles, what their space could look like they could go in, they can change their paint colors, they can change their fixtures, they can put the furniture in.
I can tell you unequivocally, it’s a great idea. It doesn’t sell homes, right? You know what sells homes are people and tactile touch feel. And emotion.
Carmen Wageman —
Absolutely.
Christan Bosley —
You’re not getting that from goggles.
Carmen Wageman —
No. Yeah. And who really buys the house is the woman.
Christan Bosley —
Yeah. Or is the final decision maker. Absolutely true.
Carmen Wageman —
And so you want to make sure that you appeal to them because that’s their nest, and they’ll want to touch and feel the nest. And so I think traditional staging is still going to continue on, and I just hope that the industry continues to elevate and not go in for the cheap and cheerful look of what we see sometimes, which I think has a disservice to the industry.
Christan Bosley —
Absolutely. And I think the next couple of years we’ll be telling too whether or not that actually happens, because I’m of the opinion that the market that we’re in right now is actually just a normal market. We’re all so accustomed to a market that’s going up at a huge trajectory, which is not normal or sustainable. Right. And so I believe that- Or good for anybody. No, no. I don’t think it’s healthy. So I believe that where we are right now is where we are going to be for the next three to five years.
And it’s interesting to me watching where people are already cutting corners, cutting costs, saving the different companies that are creating different things. So hopefully they continue to elevate, but I think we’ll see what happens over the short term probably.
Carmen Wageman —
Right.
Christan Bosley —
But let’s talk about how you’re elevating. You have some exciting things coming in September.
Carmen Wageman —
Well, so yes, so that actually, that’s a really good approach, dovetail approach to this, because if an agent is finding it more challenging to accommodate the price points of what staging has become, the cost of what staging has become, many of the agents out there want to try to do it themselves.
And actually, before I came into this industry, agents were doing it themselves. They had garages filled with linens and tables and coffee tables that they would throw in their car and bring, I know this, because they would tell me all the time that that’s…
Christan Bosley —
I used to do it. I used to have lamps and things. It’s exhausting. I think it’s- We’re not stagers.
Carmen Wageman —
I’m just saying, like, there are some people that are skilled enough to do it, I think there are pockets where it can be done, because many stagers don’t want to come out or their base fees are such that it doesn’t warrant them, nobody wants to pay them to come and make the beds and dress the beds up and maybe throw in a few pieces of art and a couple end tables.
And so this is where I think, where we can help agents gain some confidence and some knowledge. We rent furniture now, not just to our own client base, but to anybody who wants to rent furniture, art, accessories, linens, whatever you need. We have everything online and you can come and rent directly from us.
Where that applies to real estate agents is we can help them without utilizing our services. We will help you create a room. If you send us a picture in the dimensions, we’ll say, well, this sofa and these pieces would work really well. We can package it up. We can ship it to you. And all the agent would have to do is throw some toss cushions, which they can rent from us as well.
So we’re finding that agents want to learn more about how to do it themselves. And so we have a school coming out. It’ll be a three-part course. The first course will be just completely lecture-based on all the tips and rules and things that I’ve learned and shortcuts and things.
And then the second one will be part lecture, part hands-on.
And then the third one is full day of just staging. And it will be in our showroom where we have little vignettes all set up.
Christan Bosley —
You know what I love about that is you always know that you have a very strong business when you’re prepared to teach people how to do what you do. That you’re not threatened by other people coming in and taking over because you’re confident in what you do and what you have to offer and that there will always be a market for your service. That’s inspiring in itself to me personally.
So well done, congratulations. I’ll look forward to hopefully participating in that just because my own house is a disaster.
Carmen Wageman —
Thank you. There are quite a few people who want to take the course just so that they can use it in their own house.
Christan Bosley —
Right, exactly, exactly. I can never figure out my bookcase. I need to understand the strategy around that.
Okay, beautiful. So I’m a sucker for a good before and after. Any standout dramatic transformational stories?
Carmen Wageman —
The transformations that I love are the ones where I’ll go in and the people are just done with the house. They’re not moving for any other reason other than they just don’t like the house. And so I’ll come in and I’ll make some pretty big, one in particular, it was a three bedroom condo on Cumberland Penthouse. And she made it into a one bedroom and another room just being a dressing room.
So I made her make it back into a two bedroom which is not insignificant work to do the wall has to go up and everything. And she had pillars and I had her remove the pillars. And she had fired three designers trying to get that condo to a point where what she wanted and she just never loved it. And so I come in and I go, okay, it’s fine, fine, fine. Now she stepped back. She’s gonna let me do whatever I want.
So I pull out some of her furniture, not all of it, but some of her furniture and we put in our furniture, redo all the art and she’s walking around with her son on the phone and she’s showing him the house. She’s going, I love it, I love it, I love it. And he says, then why are you selling? And so she took it off the market. Okay, three designers later. Three designers later. And I think it’s because she let me do what I wanted to do and she wasn’t in the way. Yeah, right. And so she just, and so she did. She absolutely took it off the market, stayed there for another two years and then the real estate agent, I think was not happy with me.
So she hired another staging company to come in and stage the house. And this is where I’ll pat myself on the back because the homeowner hated it, but they still went on the market and it didn’t sell. And then she called me up and said, can you come and redo this? Right. And then I did and then it sold.
So that’s what transformations can do. It’s not about just putting in furniture and toss cushion, it’s the right furniture and the right art and the right style that can make people inspired to buy.
Christan Bosley —
Amazing, I love that. Do you have a transformational story?
Jessica Steinman —
That one’s my favorite by far. I mean, we do moments where, or we do stagings where the people walk through. We had one recently where she walks through and she just kept gushing, oh my goodness, oh my goodness. And she just kept getting louder and louder every time she went in the room. And we don’t normally get to hear those moments. Because we’re long gone. We’re long gone at that point. We only hear it if the house sells and then, or if we need to come back because there’s a question, a concern, a comment, the dislike moment.
We don’t get the wow of the client and the excitement of the client. So we did one stage, it was you and me actually. We don’t normally go on stagings. And so we did one ourselves and we were there when the client walked in and it was just her excitement and her joy was just so there. And so those are the ones, those are the before and afters. Where the house was fine before. It wasn’t prepared for sale. But when we got it there, the joy that it brought her. So we’ll get homes and I’ll do a…
Carmen Wageman —
We’ve done a lot of walkthroughs in houses and some of the houses are not, they don’t present well. And you’ll walk around.
Christan Bosley —
You’re very diplomatic, Carmen.
Carmen Wageman —
And yes, I’ve learned. I’ve learned. So you’re walking around and you’re going, and you walk out of the house and I sometimes I’ll get in my car and I’ll go, what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with this house? And I’ll come back and I’ll share it with everybody. And you wouldn’t believe the house that I just saw.
And then we’ll go back and they’ll have done what we’ve asked them to do. They’ll have painted and they’ll have cleaned and they’ll have removed all of their furniture. And then we’ll come in and we’ll do the job and we’ll stand back. And so we don’t hear what they say because they’re coming later, but we’ll stand back and we’ll go, I’d buy this house. This is the moment that brings you joy. We know, we know, we’ve done well. We’ve done well. When we go, yeah, this is a cool house. And it always surprises me.
And I know, because I can see past a lot of that stuff, but it’s not until it’s actually done that you stand back and you go, wow, this is hot. This looks good. And that’s when we get really excited. But then when we hear the clients say it too, that’s when we get goosebumps. And we’re walking around like, I love this. I love what we do.
Christan Bosley —
Before we go, I have a couple of kind of rapid fire questions of just things that interest me selfishly that I wanna know about you. So number one, what brings you joy outside of your jobs?
Carmen Wageman —
Cycling.
Christan Bosley —
Cycling.
Carmen Wageman —
Yeah, it’s my meditative space. It’s my happy place. Yeah. Yes. Tour through France. Tour through France. I actually do the Tour de France, so yes. It’s amazing.
Christan Bosley —
Congratulations.
Carmen Wageman —
Yeah, thanks.
Christan Bosley —
Jessica?
Jessica Steinman —
I’m a really big reader. I’m an avid reader. So I like to read. I like to collect books. So I’m very on the literary side of the world.
Christan Bosley —
Well, believe it or not, that actually was my next question, Jessica. So you’re an avid reader. Are we talking like fiction, business?
Jessica Steinman —
I am definitely more of a fiction reader. I definitely like to explore other perspectives that don’t have to relate to the day-to-day stress that I deal with. Every once in a while, I’ll pick up a nonfiction self-help business book, but the audio book on my way home is definitely a fiction novel.
Christan Bosley —
Okay, amazing. So what book is on your current reading list?
Jessica Steinman —
I currently just finished The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. So it’s a World War II.
Christan Bosley —
Kristin Hannah is a beautiful author, right? She can spin a tale. She can make you believe that you’re back in any time that you have.
Jessica Steinman —
So I’ve been going through her whole collection. So I just finished The Nightingale. I’ve read like three or four of her books. Yeah, she’s great. They’re awesome. I love them.
Christan Bosley —
We have a book club at the office.
Jessica Steinman —
Oh, fun.
Christan Bosley —
And like quite a few people participate in it, but we read all business and mindset, psychology books, all that kind of fun stuff.
Do you enjoy reading, Carmen?
Carmen Wageman —
I do, but I don’t have a lot of time. So I actually, I write more than I read. And so I’m currently writing two books right now. One is more of a personal book of the journey that I’ve been on. And then another one is going to be on, well, it is actually because it’s part of the school. But it will be a how to stage on, and the premise will be directed towards real estate agents. And so I’m more of a writer than I am a reader.
Christan Bosley —
This is really exciting. I would really like to read your personal book. OK, yeah. Thank you.
What is one lesson you’ve learned in your career that you wish you knew earlier?
Jessica Steinman —
Do you want to go first?
Carmen Wageman —
Well, you go first, while I think of the answer.
Jessica Steinman —
So I started after the company was already grown. Everything was already in place, and I’m coming right out of school. So I had to learn over the last seven years that every real estate agent, they’re negotiators. They are professional negotiators. Their bread and butter is to get the best deal possible for their clients. And I had to learn that saying no was perfectly OK, and that I can make a counter offer at all times.
So just because someone’s asking does not mean that the best customer service is saying yes. And she did not learn that from me. She brought that to the table, actually, because I was honest. I learned the opposite from you. And then she was like, oh, no. So yes, that was brilliant. So that’s what I learned.
Carmen Wageman —
She’s brilliant at this.
Jessica Steinman —
Well, thank you. Yeah, I’ve learned that the hard way. But yeah, that’s the main thing that I brought to the table in our dynamic. And yeah, that’s it.
Christan Bosley —
OK, it’s a good lesson. It’s a good lesson, yeah. I personally love negotiating, so I think it’s kind of fun. OK, Carmen?
Carmen Wageman —
So it’s a tough question, because I’ve just been through so much over time. I think if I were to go back and talk to the younger version of myself, I would tell her to just believe that it’s going to be OK, that every decision that you make, whether it succeeds or doesn’t succeed, you will learn from it and be able to navigate in the right direction.
And so everything that we do and every time we go, let’s do this, whether we win or lose, it’s a learning experience for us, and it’s a lesson. And I think what we’re doing is we’re trailblazers.
Christan Bosley —
Absolutely.
Carmen Wageman —
Yeah, and I think when you do that, you fail, and you succeed, and you burn through money stupidly because of these mistakes that you made. But then you go, OK, well, I’m not going to do that. But I think we’re strong enough to do this. And so I think the journey is not over. I think we have a lot more to offer this industry, and I’m happy to explore all of that.
Christan Bosley —
OK, last rapid-fire question. If you did a TED Talk, what would it be on?
Carmen Wageman —
Showing up.
Christan Bosley —
Showing up, which is why you don’t need a business coach.
Christan Bosley —
Jessica?
Jessica Steinman —
I don’t think I would have a TED Talk. I think I’d be helping produce her TED Talk, and I think that’s why we work so well together. I am definitely more behind the camera to the person.
Christan Bosley —
Maybe writing fiction.
Jessica Steinman —
Maybe writing fiction.
Christan Bosley —
There you go. OK. I love that. Listen, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been so wonderful to learn your insights, and of course, to share your gorgeous space.
Carmen Wageman —
You’re very welcome.
Christan Bosley —
Really appreciate it. And until next time, I’m Christan Bosley. This has been Like a Bos. Take care.
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