Absolutely!
Lived-in rooms with furniture and lots of pictures on the walls look “homey” and comfortable… And I can glance at the couch and say, “gee my couch is a little shorter than that one, so I know this living room is right for me.” If there are old magazines on the floor, I know my magazines will end up in the same spot, so I can more easily imagine the place as being mine.
Empty rooms look dead, and I can’t tell if my stuff would fit.
But I guess I’m in the minority…
It is all about what the woman wants. I don’t mean to sound sexist in the least but do guys really give a shit about closet space? We can fix anything. Or maybe not but as long as the house is sound and the wife likes it, she gets veto power.
It is way easier to fix a problem in a new house than confront an angry spouse.
I find it really funny that realtors tell you to depersonalize your space, but model new homes hire people to “stage” it and the first thing they do is figure out who their market is, then they tailor their little drama to that. “This is geared toward retirees or people who are about to retire. So we’ll have a pen and some wedding invitations sitting on the desk, and a couple of baby pictures that could be a grandchild. Maybe a basket with some yarn and a few rows of knitting.”
Seriously, some new home sellers do this.
Yeah. You’ve hit it here, Jodi–we’re completely sick of it, but we have to remember that for all viewings, the prospects are seeing it for the first time. But yes, it sounds like we’ll have to continue living in the depersonalized museum that was once our home, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Good thing my wife worked her way through university as a hotel chamber maid–she knows how to do everything fast and well and professionally. And I’m learning her tricks and techniques, as you might guess.
Odd what turns some people off. So far, we’ve learned from one prospect that our house has bad feng shui, that the stairs would prove too much to another prospect (so why are you looking at a two-storey house?), and yet another doesn’t want a finished basement. Because he wants to finish it himself? No, because he doesn’t want one, period. Still others want an “open plan,” where the kitchen/living/dining areas are pretty much all one room (think a house like the Bundy’s on “Married With Children” and you’ve got the idea), so they can keep an eye on the kids. Ours is a little more traditional, with the kitchen in its own room, so we’ve lost that demographic right there. I think our realtor’s description of our kitchen’s breakfast nook as a “homework station” is falling on deaf ears; maybe we’d have a little more interest if we called it a “martini bar.”
Okay, that last was an attempt at humour, but you get the idea. Thanks for the feedback, folks. And sorry for not getting back to this thread sooner–I was out of town and away from the computer for a few days. Guess we’ll keep on cleaning–and I’ll keep you posted.
When I was selling my townhouse, the buyer backed out of a deal we had already agreed on because someone told them my house was haunted. People are weird - you might have noticed that. 
Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Staging can also help with weird spaces. If a room doesn’t have an immediately identifiable purpose, putting in a daybed or a bistro table can give a buyer ideas and reassure them that it’s not just wasted space.
What in heck were all of those “hundreds and hundreds” of spiders eating? :eek:
Other spiders?
(Thanks, Walrus. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened. )
We’ve been house hunting since February, and our (rented) house has been on the market since early July.
I don’t really care if it’s cluttered, but if it smells, that’s another thing. As other posters have pointed out, it’s a sign of neglect/lack of care/deferred maintenance/hidden problems.
And we are the exception to the Sell Your House-type shows that suggest replacing carpeting and repainting, kitchen remodels, new roof etc. before staging, if only because we have yet to see any of these things done with any care. It might be new, but it already looks like cr@p and I don’t want to have to pay for it in the house purchase price, then pay for it again when we have someone do it properly before we move in.
The only showing our (rented) home has had was for the realtor tour. They walked in, threw their cards on our table, walked to the bedroom in the back and walked out. Maybe a minute, tops. Didn’t open cupboards, just doors. Filed in and filed out. Of course, the place was on the market last year, so perhaps they all remember it from then, but it sure felt like a waste of time. No one went into the yard, utility room or even the huge living room and third bedroom. Frankly, this place is awesome. If it was on forty acres of good land, we’d buy it in a heartbeat. We’ve got lots of great shots that show off the interior and exterior of the house and even video tours that we’d put online for our family to see when we moved up and we told the realtor to make use of whichever ones she liked. But instead she’s using four pics from when the house was on the market before that show nothing, and the listing description really only talks about the appliances in the kitchen and the third bedroom “off the garage.” We don’t have a garage. Just lazy and sloppy work, seems to me.
Yet this realtor’s name has come up as a recommendation several times.
I don’t even want to get started on working with a “buyer’s agent.” Again, lazy. “We can find that out in escrow” is not an acceptable answer!
Anyway, It’s Lovely I’ll Take It! is a blog I’ve been enjoying lately, given how immersed we are in the real estate hunt, and showcases shoddy photography and lack of attention to detail in the market quite nicely.
Yeah, smelly is a kiss of death for us (especially smoke smell). We assume that if the house smells, we will be spending mucho dinero to get the smells out of carpet, drapes, cupboards, closets, etc. I wouldn’t even buy a house that smelled of cigarette smoke - we’d be renovating top to bottom. And I have an excellent sniffer - if someone smokes in a house, I’d know it.
Heh, reminds me of my adventures in house-hunting.
There was this place that has now entered the family mythology as “cigarette house”. and for good reason.
The place looked lovely and was in a wonderful neighbourhood - in fact, only a block from where we actually bought. The price seemed reasonable so I went to see it with high hopes.
It was inhabited by one of those little old ladies who beat all the odds and lived to be ninety while smoking a couple of packs a day - the tobacco appeared to have literally mummified her while she was still alive (and she was still alive - smoking away in the backyard while we toured the house). Unfortunately it mummified the house as well, as she quite obviously smoked indoors. Everything was neat and tidy - just covered, just covered, with a light coating (and in some places not so light) of cigarette tar. To the point where the whole place had a sort of brown glaze.
The smell was something unreal - enough to make you gag; quite literally, every moment in that place was like sucking the fermenting juice from a years-old public ashtray left soaking in the rain. We actually could not complete our tour of the place, and at the time I was a smoker myself.
The place eventually sold, I assume to someone who intended a complete gut job. Mere cleaning, repainting and removal of carpets would never dent that reek, I think.
Ugh. One of the first places we looked at was actually a pretty good place, but with the utter absolute reek of cigarettes and overflowing ashtrays amidst the oxygen tanks, it made it hard to form a positive association and I felt nauseated from a headache all day that started there.
I didn’t want to wuss out just 'cuz the house was a “lil stinky,” but in hindsight I should have just walked right out. The realtor’s car also smelled like cigarettes and we’d made the mistake of meeting at his office to carpool so we were stuck and the headachey nausea never got better.
In hindsight we should have told him to take us back so we could drive our own car. I’m generally pretty healthy and hadn’t felt that sick in a long time then or since.
It’s one thing to think, “hey, we’d want new flooring and paint anyway” and it’s another thing to be made physically ill.