Staging...schmaging?
In my year(s) long search for a house I looked at several houses that were essentially unoccupied but staged for resale.
"Essentially" = the house I ended up buying was used as a pied-a-terre, for a couple hours a week and maybe one overnight a month. (?)
One of the houses I offered on had visible condition issues, and just looked a little bit run-down (which was fine). But it was staged with a various assortment of furniture, obviously repainted, and had a "set" table, and "vignette" of open cookbook and utensils and some ingredients on the counter in the kitchen. Granted, I think this was the budget plan, but in the almost 9 months the house was staged they probably spent a few thousand dollars for those things all told. For my money I would have fixed or changed out the rickety door knobs and broken bits and pieces of things and not bothered with staging. It really looked more like college students had left behind furniture like they do in rentals all over the neighborhood.
The house I bought was "marketed" to the buyer in two ways:
1) the house was repainted top to bottom, the house got new rugs on the second and third floors, and it was obviously staged with some furniture and accessories.
2) Apparently based upon potential buyer feedback at open houses and showings, the house was taken off the market and a powder room was converted to a 3/4 bath.
Mind you, this zipcode never had a drastic drop in values even in 2008, and houses in the price point of this one are the ones that sell relatively fast.
Since my current apartment is not selling, I went ahead and bought the house but I am renting it out.
The renters asked, as some of you may know, that the house be repainted and if the rugs were there for a previous tenant that they be replaced. Not because anything was marked up or worn, but because they hated the color of everything.
Personally I think the carpet is fine, but everything is painted various shades of tan, the carpet is tan, and the primary wallcolor, the accent color, the trim color and the carpet (all tan, the whole house) --don't particularly look very good together. I thought, okay they didn't want the house to look so empty so they brought in some more furniture and picked a kind of unfortunate color combination and went with it.
I wanted them to not do the 3/4 bath, and unfortunately when I move in (hopefully in a year), a brand new 3/4 bath is going to be gutted, because it's not a good brand new 3/4. It had already been gutted when I asked them to stop, and it seemed like a more rentable property with another shower....so I let them go ahead.
I got a call yesterday from the sellers because with the construction some of the hallway needs to be repainted and they don't know what the color was . . . because the house was staged by a professional staging company. (!)
This house was bought despite the staging and Rented by Renters in spite of the staging.
I reached a compromise and agreed to paint their bedrooms because I wanted to make sure I had decent renters in their for the start of the semester.
But my experience has been that the sellers should have diverted the staging expense to basic repairs in the first case, and that the sellers wasted a lot of money in the second case.
On the other side of the coin, a showing showed up early at my place to look and the Realtor said "Oh this is beautifully staged!" I said that we lived in it like that all the time...isn't there any expectation that people are going to just let people see how they live in it?
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