I sold my house about 3 years ago, and the realtor staged it, but it was a lot less intrusive than what others have described. We didn’t have to move out or anything - they rearranged existing furniture and put some in storage, brought in some new furniture, lamps, artwork etc. It was included in their percentage, so it didn’t cost me anything out of pocket - all I had to do was sign an agreement that I’d pay if anything they owned was damaged.
Oh, that makes me miss Ground Force. Sigh. They actually came to the US. But the funniest thing was when I watched AbFab back in the day, Edina was ranting on about Charlie “Bloody” Dimmock when she wanted to re-do her garden. I thought she was talking about a man!
This reminds me that there used to be a Canadian show called The Stagers, and it followed some stagers who worked for a particular company. There was one guy in particular who could work miracles. I enjoyed watching the process of trying to work with a difficult space. One I especially remember was a tiny condo with really weird angles. I had no idea how to make furniture work in the space, but he did an awesome job.
Our kids are having their place staged to sell (it is happening today, as I type this). They moved everything into storage and moved in with us. They will be moving out of the area. The market here (Washington DC) is hot hot hot, so the staging is likely a minor advantage.
When we sold our place last year in Los Angeles the realtor did virtual staging. No physical stuff was moved in, it was all photoshopped. It looked spectacular in the pictures. They even put cars in the garage. Again, it was a hot hot hot market and sold in a day above asking price.
This is the part of home advertising that annoys me the most - you almost never see shots of the inside of garages, or where outside parking is. So it’s hard to get a sense of how your vehicle might fit in.
This style was popular when we sold. They emphasized space and a blank slate. They suggested removing around a 3rd of the furniture. Make bedrooms genderless and remove evidence of the age of the occupants. Let the buyer picture their family in the house not yours. Our realtor had an option for them to do it for a price. In the end they just walked through and made suggestions for us to do on our own.
In our case, the garage was a major feature. It was a 4 car garage (2 x 2) and one back quadrant had been turned into a storage/office. So, seeing the configuration with 3 cars in place (as we used it) was meaningful.
I assume that all North American real-estate related shows are actually Canadian. If no city is mentioned, the city is almost always Toronto.
The references to “en suite” bathrooms seems to give it away.
It is worth it.
We had two homes we were interested in. The listed prices were the same.
The nicer one had been perfectly staged.
The larger one still had furniture etc in it, and it was a bit of a mess.
Nice one sold that following Monday, with multiple offers, iirc $35000 over asking.
The larger one had to accept our offer of $15k less and all closing costs.
That’s $50K difference.
Now, of course, YMMV, depending on location and market.
In the US and Canada this is called “Love it or List it”, and although the improvements help the owners keep (love it) the house, the staging (most of which is decor live vases of fake flowers and such) is what sells it, imho. But of course, a real lived in home never looks like a staged house.
IIRC, they have to pay for the remodel, but not the move out, move in and of course lots of the staged gee-gaws and such are not included, they are re-used.
My buddy was one of five heirs to a large house in Santa Monica. They fixed it up, and staged it. It sold for something like $8M, who promptly bulldozed it to build a McMansion.
Acorn has that and iirc so does Sundance.
The show is based in Canada, sure, but the houses are all over the USA.
I always heard that as “sell like hotcakes”. Must be a local thing.
There’s a staging show “Sell This House” that popped up on a local broadcast channel. Their primary rule seems to be: If the rooms are painted in light neutral colors, repaint them in bold colors. If they are painted in bold colors, repaint them in light neutral colors.
We’re also prepping for selling at the moment. The realtor had professional stagers come in and we hated them. They also wanted about $3000 to put in furniture that we can neither sit on nor sleep on. So we went to Rent-a-Center, and for literally 10% of that cost have rented brand new furniture for a month and will stage it ourselves. All our ‘stuff’ will be out of there, of course. If people won’t buy because they don’t like the furniture, then they’re not serious buyers in the first place.
Veering a bit off-topic, but I’m unwilling to start a new thread.
It has been 23 years since we sold/bought a home. Back in 1999, we did a contingency sale, the kind that says you have to have a new home secured before the sale of the old one can go through, and that came off without a hitch for us back then. But I’m reading here and there that contingency sales are more problematic nowadays. The alternative to a contingency sale is to just sell the current home, bank the profits after paying the mortgage off, and then rent an AirBnB at the new town while you shop for a home. Is this wise? One is technically homeless, I suppose, but with cash in hand it shouldn’t take too long to snap up a new place as soon as it comes on the market. That’s my way of thinking, anyway. What are the drawbacks?
I know in this crazy market, if your offer is a contingency and someone else makes a fairly close but lesser offer without the contingency, the non-contingency offer will almost surely be accepted.
That helped us get this house. We came in at asking price and promised that as a DIY guy and 3rd time buyer we wouldn’t be nitpicking the little stuff… Someone else was 10k over but with a contingency and the 3rd was 1st time buyers out of NYC and the Agent and Seller made the judgement they would be nitpicky.
Mrs. L will be staging ours. She has a good eye for that sort of thing.
If you’re like us, you have approximately twice the number of towels you really use (for instance) so a lot of it is paring down. You don’t have to give those towels away but you do have to store them. Or you could downsize, sell them off, whatever. But the less stuff you have, the bigger the house looks. For me, it’s existentialist—do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you? That towel that your uncle stole from the Holiday Inn in Fresno and presented it to you has sentimental value, sure, but c’mon.
Word from our realtor is that we don’t have to have a sale—we have to have an offer—to qualify to buy. At that point, bank A and bank B talk, and bank B puts a lien on the profit-to-be.
The thing about renting (which we hope to avoid) is that you have to move your stuff from A to storage to B. If you’re not doing it yourself you’re paying for an extra move, so to speak.
Likewise when we sold our condo 15 years ago; we hid some stuff and the real estate agent brought in a couple of vases. Did it help? Who knows.
DABL? The stager on that show is awful. One of his “tricks” is using sheets for tablecloths and curtains, and he never presses them. So, there are all these wrinkly thin fabrics all over the house. He also takes out too much furniture. Surprisingly, rooms can look larger with furniture in them than nearly empty.
Depends on where you’re moving to. In the Bay Area, or Austin based on a Times article, the competition is so fierce and the inventory so low that it might take a while to get someone to accept an offer on a new house unless you’re willing to go way over asking price. And way over. Some around here have sold for over $100K over.
Around here 90% of the garages are so filled with stuff that you couldn’t get a car in anyhow. And it’s not like they’re decorated. N car garage would seem good enough.
25 years ago when we sold our house in NJ we self-staged it with a new paint job and moving all the clutter into the attic or into a storage area. It sold during the open house, and we decided we shouldn’t wait until we sold a house to clean it up in the future. (The market then was good but not that good.)
I suspect in the current market keeping away from red flags would be enough. When we bought back then some of the places we toured had holes in the wall, others had crammed closets and another had clutter all over the place. None of which made us want to make an offer.