It’s amazing how many people don’t declutter before listing their home. Quite a few HGTV shows emphasize that stuff should be boxed up and put in storage. Extra furniture needs to go into storage too. Leave just enough furniture for day to day use and to give the home a staged look.
Professional realtors will rent furniture to stage a empty house before showing it. All the HGTV shows claim it makes the sale much easier.
If they aren’t already, the HGTV shows may as well be subsidized by the real estate and home improvement businesses. Most people are shown taking their agent’s advice, professing to need all the trendy upgrades to consider living anywhere (“I couldn’t LIVE w/o granite countertops!”) and financing a house at or above their budget. Real estate agent’s wet dream on all counts.
When we house hunted 2 years ago we saw empty, staged, cluttered and ‘moving out stopped long enough for us to walk through’; I have no preference b/c I pay attention to the smells and where they come from.
There was one house that was so packed w/ things we had to walk through the basement single file but that one was out of consideration when we arrived anyway (Smack dab under buzzing power lines) and we walked through b/c our real estate agent pleaded w/ us to do so as the people were there and she said it would make her look good. So the older couple listened when I pointed out all the fixtures that had disappeared from the online listing pictures. They got scarce after that.