Get Your Home Staging Certification Online

This quick answer to this is, no. Please take two minutes to read why.

In a nutshell, RESA (Real Estate Staging Association) is an independent third party that can determine whether a certain set of standards are met for home staging courses. If the standards are met, the course provider can pay $500 per year, and a $750 application fee, to display the RESA logo on their website and be listed on the RESA website.

Here are the reasons why The Home Staging Institute hasn’t submitted an application to become RESA Accredited.

1) RESA was established in 2007, a year after the Home Staging Institute was founded. $500 per year isn’t a lot, but over more than a decade it adds up. Our goal is to make home staging courses affordable for everyone, and cutting unnecessary costs helps us achieve that. At the time of writing, there are four RESA Accredited home staging courses, and three of these courses range in price from $999 to $1,300. Our most popular home staging course is just $247. We couldn’t find pricing for the fourth accredited course, despite clear and transparent pricing being a requirement to become accredited.

2) We already know our course is quality, and we feel we don’t need a third party to tell you it’s quality. We’ll let our past customers do that for us. We’ve been doing this for nearly 15 years and have taught thousands of students. You can read many of their reviews on our website. Our refund rate is under 1%, and for these few unsatisfied customers, we offer an immediate refund with no questions asked. We’ve purchased many other home staging courses (it pays to keep an eye on other courses so we can continually improve!), and have been embarrassed and shocked by some of the low-quality content.

3) The criteria to become a RESA accredited course are published on the RESA website. We meet 98% of the criteria, but there are a few things like the “manual must be large enough to accommodate notes” that we don’t meet. We are an online course and encourage our students to resist printing materials. All our slides, forms, templates, and checklists are provided digitally. A lot of the other requirements they check are what we would consider absolute bare minimums. For example, there can be no “get rich” promises, we must respond in a timely manner to customer inquiries, advertising must be 100% truthful etc. Of course, the Home Staging Institute abides by this Code of Ethics. We wouldn’t be in business for as long as we have if we didn’t.

4) There are 61 topics RESA states accredited home staging courses must include. The Home Staging Institute teaches most of these, but not all of them. For example, we don’t teach ‘Listening Skills’, and we don’t teach how to check domain name availability (for those wondering, it takes 30 seconds on a website like Namecheap.com to check domain name availability). We dive into additional topics that aren’t RESA requirements, like how to build your website, the role of a company blog, and how to excel in search engine optimization in the home staging industry.

Our final word on this topic is that we support what RESA is doing, but it’s not for us. We’ll let our history and student testimonials speak for themselves, save the $500 annual fee, and continue to offer what we feel is the best home staging certification available online, albeit not RESA accredited home staging training.