We're Moving! (part 7) Staging ... spawn of the devil

Before we start, a personal note to you.
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Thanks in anticipation.

Now back to our regular programming.
"Staging" is stupid, deceptive and drives me nuts.  We used a great stager and I know it helped sell our house. So, that about sums it up.

A little more detail ...
First, the rant.
Even before staging, there was the pretty kitchen syndrome.  Two similar houses. One with new and updated wiring, roof, furnace, plumbing, beautifully maintained; not a lot of kitchen/bath/decor upgrades but whatever had to be done was done and done well.  It has a "lived in" look as a result of raising a family and collecting a couple of decades of memories.

The other house has older systems and a bit of a musty smell in the basement, but the old carpets have been pulled and the floors stripped and urethaned, a few gallons of taupe applied, and a shiny new IKEA kitchen installed.

Guess which house sells first for more money.

Picking up on this syndrome, an entire "staging" industry developed.
Early on, we had the perfect house for staging.  A young and handy couple with a family spent every last penny doing an outstanding job of reno'ing a house in a good solid middle-of-the-road neighbourhood.  Unfortunately, the reno'd a little past the top end of the neighbourhood and all their money went to the reno and the kids.  We had toys and tools, but no furniture.  The house needed to be furnished and decorated in a manner befitting the budget of a buyer for this high quality renovated property.  Enter the stager and a van load of rented furniture, art, bedding, pillows, etc.  Perfect.

But then almost everybody started doing it.  Houses didn't just have to be clean and solid.  They had to be "decluttered" to the point of "unliveable".  And it worked.  The house that looked like magazine photo shoots of houses where no-one ever reads a magazine or uses a towel sold.  The house that looked like real people lived in it just sat there.

With time, we thought it might get better.  As people saw more and more staging and the media picked up on the trend, we thought clients were learn to see through staging and to see potential.
What happened? (go ahead, click)http://www.leadingthewayhome.com/Files/buzzer.wav
Instead it got worse.  Now we could show clients 5 houses.  4 might be staged, one not.  Previously, the 4 would sell first.  Suddenly it was hard to even get your clients to go through the unstaged one.

It went from a reward for the staged to being a penalty for the unstaged.  Buyers were even suspicious of why a seller wasn't staged.  It all reminds me of what has happened to hitchhiking.  In our youth, there were occasional hitching issues, but it was nonetheless quite common and positive.  Now, I won't pick anybody up -- "what kind of person would be hitching?", and I would never hitch -- "what kind of person would pick me up?"

We're Moving! (part 6) How long has that been like that?

Yes, you!

Well, I guess we'll have to do a little touch up here and there.  At least a few baseboards where a former resident tended to sleep on her back while pawing the baseboards.  And where the cleaning ladies have bounced and dragged things (stereotype alert: Portuguese cleaning ladies tend to be a little aggressive; on the other hand they do a great job, reliably, for a decent price, and often sing while cleaning).

In spots, we even get a peek at the goat-puke green semi-gloss the place was covered in when we bought.

And Lee says: "We have to paint the bedroom".  But Gord says: "It's fine".  Lee: "I hate yellow". Gord: "But it's fine and it goes with the bedding".  Lee says ... well, nothing really, but we're painting the bedroom.

Oh, jeez look at those nicks on the wall corners ... how are we going to deal with those?  Paint the wall.  Which is connected to another wall.  Which is connected to a stairwell.  etc.

You know those two drawer pulls that came apart and that you can't get anymore so you have to replace all the pulls in both bathrooms?  Well, they only make screws that are 1/4 in. too short or 1/4 in. too long for the way the vanities were built.

I guess we never got around to framing that bathroom mirror, did we? It really would look better framed.

Lee: "We're painting the bathrooms, too" ... Gord: "Aw c'mon, they're great ... Those are 'treatments' and just the way the guy said that (with a certain trill and hand wave) I think cost us an extra $500" ... Lee: "I hate it. It's dated. I'm* painting the bathroom"
[update: an actual compromise ... with a little support from the painter, we agreed that only one washroom needed de-treatmenting.  Which brings us to the asterisk. "I'm painting" means "someone other than me is painting"]

And so on.

With Gord's amazing handyman skills, this should only take a couple of days.
[pause for hysterical laughter]
Without even applying the standard rule of thumb for Gord projects (double the estimate and take it to the next order of time ... 2 days = 4 weeks)

Simultaneously, we still have jobs, Gord is about 2 years behind on paperwork (courtesy of a very easy Quicken update that smoothly obliterated nearly a year of financial data just in time for the approaching tax season),  and as our own agents we have a ton of work to do for our own listing.

Enter John Peirson of Inside Job (jrpeirson@gmail.com ... 647-864-4464), painter handyman and saviour ... good, nice, calm, quick and reasonable.

The lesson of course is that all that stuff that you never got around to because you were busy and it wasn't that big a deal or you barely noticed -- is the same stuff that you would notice in someone else's house and everyone will notice in yours and wonder if it reflects your careless general approach to home maintenance.

Next up: a vitriolic staging rant ... sort of

We're Moving! Part 5 ... Oh, the Horror

We're starting to look pretty good.  We've filled up our garbage and recycling bins a few times, along with those of a neighbour or two.  Bags of clothes have gone to good homes from Toronto to Mumbai and Africa.  The locker is still navigable but starting to look like it's doing its job.

The sprucing up is on track (there will be a post on this), I guess I'd best deal with the home office.

Ask me how I feel about this?

I'm sorry.  Can't talk any more. Must lay down.  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. The thing is a room-size junk drawer. Breathe.

The Other Hand: Staging, Stats, and Skipped Bits

Here I go again with my lectures about looking reasonably carefully before jumping to conclusions and "answers".

A good agent who is also a great marketer dropped a card in our mailbox the other day with a two-sided pitch on the benefits of home staging. We absolutely believe that staging has become almost essential for most homes in today's market.

I have a pet rant about staging, but it's pointless to bore you with it -- whether I "like" universal staging doesn't matter; it usually works if done right; and since everybody else is going to do it, you pretty much have to do it as well.

But the amount and type of staging depends on the market, the particular home and other circumstances.

Like selecting an agent and nearly everything else in real estate, staging has a whole bunch of "art" and "situation" about it.

A nice survey-based table showing how much you will "make" on a given staging activity looks very scientific and "factual". If only it were that simple. The piece in my mailbox gives examples such as "Update kitchen and bathrooms" at a cost of $1404-$1828 yielding a price increase of $3216-$3934. To the author's credit, a source is noted: "HomeGain survey of 2000 sales representatives nationwide..."

My bank account seems to drop more than $1828 by just speaking to a contractor, let alone actually doing a kitchen reno. Note it says "updating". They are probably talking about a countertop and sink, some paint and a few other bits. Now if you have to deal with solidly laid out-of-fashion ceramic tile on the floor, a nice 70's era "Florida ceiling" and avocado appliances ... well, start by adding another zero to the cost.

Then there's that HomeGain survey itself. HomeGain is an American real estate marketing firm. Their survey was of sales representatives in the U.S. and appears to have come out in 2007 as the market was beginning to badly misbehave down there. Not sure how big a difference any of those things make, but they give me pause.

[The HomeGain survey results can be found in a very useful HomeGain guide that you can download here ]

On the other side of the card, another survey result: professionally staged homes sell 80% faster!

Again, all credit to the agent for noting the source. StagedHomes.com is an organization involved in the training, accreditation and promotion of stagers.

The data was gathered during the period when BOTH Canadian and American markets were slumping. The bit not mentioned in the source-credit: 55% of the homes were vacant!

And the 80% differential is between 37 days to sell for the staged home vs. 6 months for the others! The average days-on-market for the entire Toronto area in September was a very-low 27 days.

To summarize, I'm not dissing staging. It's important and works when done right in the right situation. But the "proof" in these statistics and surveys is far from conclusive. Really I'm just illustrating a caveat for many things in real estate ... and life, for that matter:

Wiser people than I have warned about the tendency to try to make decisions and issues as simple as we want them to be, rather than dealing with the complexity that truly comprises them.

"If a string has one end, then it has another end"
"Policy [or rules] are for the guidance of wise men, and the strict adherence of fools".