This is much the same as those people who buy a shabby old house, spend a minimal amount making it look smarter and sell it at a considerable profit. Many a TV series on the subject.
I know little about buying and selling houses, but I suspect it’s not a lot different to buying and selling cars. If you want to sell a car, you would be foolish not to spend a few hours or a few Pounds/Dollars getting it clean. You will have the paperwork in order and make sure that it will starts easily and sound as it should. You can overdo it though - Personally, I don’t like to see a shiny engine or painted wheels, but I don’t want to see old parking tickets or sweet wrappers in the footwell either
Maybe we’re alone on this, but when I was house shopping with my wife we always hated the houses that were obviously “staged” regardless of what the actual house was like. It was always so generic that it made the entire house look, not worse, but more like “not memorable” to us. The houses we did like were either completely empty or still being actively lived in. The house we ended up buying was the latter.
I bought my house in 1993. I called a realtor based on a recommendation. She was amazing. I spoke to her on the phone for maybe ten minutes and she said that she knew the perfect house for me. The problem was that the owner was a bit of a pill. He had to sell the place because of a divorce but he didn’t have to make it easy. She didn’t want to bother him unless she was sure.
The realtor spent a day with me taking me to maybe ten other houses and got my opinion on each one. At the end of the day she was even more sure that the first place would be perfect. She told me over and over to look past the cosmetic interior. My god it was horrible looking inside. Crappy disgusting dirty carpet, tacky wall paper, it wasn’t a hoarder situation but it was very messy. It didn’t matter to me at all. I loved the neighborhood and as soon as I crossed the threshold I knew that it was the perfect home for me. I am still there now and I hope to be here for another few decades.
Yeah, there will always be people who can see past these things. I’m among them, and bought a house that reflected that, but I got the distinct impression we are a minority.
The bet that sellers have to make is probably about which group – that is likely to view their for-sale house – is larger:
Those who prefer to see a house with the ‘lived-in’ look
Those who prefer to see a house that’s been stripped bare of all furnishings – just empty
Those who prefer to see a house that’s been ‘rendered sterile --’ all personal stuff removed, and the house professionally staged
And what each group might be likely to pay for that house.
And which might get turned off if it isn’t the way they prefer.
Then there’s the:
Those who want everything to be perfect – “move-in ready”
Those who are either willing to save some money by fixing up a place themselves
But the imagination piece is far from a given.
When I worked in commercial real estate (sales and leasing of industrial space, office space, shopping centers), years ago, it was a bit mind-boggling how little ability most clients had to:
Walk into a space that was previously built out (for another tenant), and imagine their use fitting in that space
Walk into a space that was in ‘shell condition’ (slab floor, stud walls, no drop ceiling, etc.), and imagine it built out
Walk into a space that was a ‘vanilla box’ (four white walls, drop ceiling, a bathroom, and commercial carpet), and imagine their use in that space
You had to get good at creating serviceable floor plan drawings, walking clients through them (and the spaces), and helping them get a picture in their minds, both on paper and standing in the space.
[This was obviously before all the CAD-type, whiz-bang software that, virtually, can make any space look any way with relative ease.]
But if you took your business seriously, you didn’t take for granted that the client was going to be able to see what you needed them to see.
I’m a puzzle fanatic, so personally it wouldn’t bother me. But I have my puzzle on a board, and I’d move it someplace if I were showing my house. Puzzles, I must admit, are usually a kind of clutter, though one I love.
When we sold our last house we decluttered like hell. We had toys in the living room closets, but neatly arranged. It sold during the open house.
When we were looking for a house we toured several that were a mess, with a bedroom cluttered with clothes. No thanks, since we were nervous about someone who couldn’t get it together when selling a $350K house (25 years ago).
Empty houses might be okay but are less appealing than neat, staged houses. Obvious staging doesn’t work either. We toured new construction one block over, and they did things like remove doors and put in too small beds to make rooms look bigger, and remove curtains from the bathroom to make it lighter. Didn’t work for me.
I think it helps if someone gives the impression that they loved and took care of their house, true or not.
There was an episode of one of the “million dollar listings” shows that had some sports celebrity’s house for sale. It was laughably tacky, with huge murals (of him), a catwalk for strippers (complete with poles), and garish decor everywhere. They had an open house for other realtors, and all they were doing is trying to figure out how to sell that albatross.
Of course the state of the housing market is a huge factor. I bought my place in a declining market (fortunately for me at the exact bottom) and houses were on the market for months. This same house today, even if it was in the previous crappy condition, would sell for cash in a few days with no inspection for 5.5 times what I paid.
If we didn’t have a ton of experience with construction and remodeling, we never would have bought this place. But the inspection assured us it had “good bones” and it met all of our criteria, with the bonus of 3 acres. And we were a lot younger 17 years ago. No way we’d make the same choice today.
When we sold our house in the spring of 2019, the agent asked us to remove all the art work from the walls, move the appliances from the kitchen counter, clear the admittedly cluttered coffee table and so on. We did most of what she asked. On the first day of showing, there were 12 visitors and 4 offers–two about asking price, one of which was without inspection. Maybe she was right. She did not ask us to do anything about the bookcases scattered through the house. That coffee table is now cluttered worse than before we moved.
A friend spent a couple months painting her entire house before putting it up for sale. The first thing the new owner did was redecorate top to bottom.
The important thing, the agent said, was for the prospective buyer to imagine living there. But whether bareness allows them to imagine filling it or lived-in-ness allows them to imagine living there is not obvious to me.
When I had the chance to arrange my large room however I wanted, I wound up with the furniture around the edge of the room, leaving the center for me to lay out papers on the floor while working. Even though it was ugly and unattractive.
But I also know that in 10 minutes the graphics artists can do a better screen layout than I can do in a full day.
Some people just care about appearance a lot more than I do, notice it more, and know what to do about it.
When I watch home-buying TV, the interior designer is constantly talking about the color of the walls, and what it does to the appearance of the rooms and the house. I’ve never seen her turn books spine-to-the-wall, to make the walls white and the room look bigger and brighter, but that’s only because there never are any books If she had book-colored walls, I’m sure it would drive her crazy.
The puzzle … the books … the photographs … the stuff of real life … it could all be a distraction from what the real estate agent (and the seller) want you to be thinking about – the house.
When my wife and I were house hunting, I think I did a good job at looking past the fluff and looking at the stuff that mattered, but I could easily see myself noticing a record (LP) collection, or a library chock full of interesting books, etc., and getting sidetracked.
Which is a slightly different take on why sellers might want their for-sale home to be “generically beautiful.”
I wouldn’t care about a puzzle on the table - but people aren’t marketing houses to me. They’re marketing houses to whoever they can attract who has the highest bank balance.
I bet all the nice organized people who like to have everything off their benches have higher median incomes than the “don’t care about the clutter” demographic.
It seems like basic common sense not to leave a puzzle out when strangers are in your house. One could be the kind of psychopath who pockets a piece. Or even worse, one who sits down and finishes it.
My wife’s pride and joy was her rose garden. She spent eight years building up a beautiful collection in a concentric pattern of quarter circles separated by brick walks. People in the neighborhood would come to take pictures there before going to prom.
We sold the house, moved out and a few weeks later I returned to that street to return something to one of our former neighbors. The buyers of our house had ripped out the entire rose garden, plants, mulch, bricks and all. They had put in sod.
When I got home my wife asked how the rose garden looked. I told her it was lovely. Fortunately we had moved 50+ miles away and she never had occasion to back there.
When i was house shopping, one house had an extensive hosta garden. And one of the conditions of sale was giving the seller access to take divisions of some of the hostas during whatever season is good for dividing hostas. (That was a long time ago.) Implicitly, you had to agree not to rip it the hostas until after that window passed.
If I’d bought the house, i think i would have kept the hosta garden.
I wonder if that made it harder to sell? Obviously, it mattered a lot to the seller.
I think there are two main reasons for stripping out signs of the seller’s identity.
many people lack imagination, and if a house looks like “someone else”, even in very benign, bland ways, like a wedding photo on the wall, it’s harder for a significant fraction of buyers to imagine the house is theirs.
many people lack spacial perception, and if you remove clutter and extra furniture they imagine the rooms to be larger than they actually are.
If she had book-colored walls, I’m sure it would drive her crazy.