You are exactly, perfectly, right on-track! Teamwork. Can you imagine, as a home seller, that when you list your house a ‘team’ of professionals descends on your place to prepare it for sale? What’s that? This is exactly what happens now with the painters, gardeners and stagers? Oh … but then why is the Home Inspector conspicuously absent from the list? Shouldn’t we send in the doctor for diagnosis and assessment before we break out the scalpels or order from the pharmacy?

We HI’s have ‘pushed’, promoted and begged for this opportunity to contribute to the home sale process and add value to the home for more than the quarter century that I’ve been in the biz but the concept has never really caught on in a significant way. My guess is that it has never been proven to make sense from a cost vs. profit perspective. That would be hard to measure but that perception is the only explanation I can hang my hat on.

Part of the argument I hear against the pre-listing inspection is that the future buyer isn’t going to trust the HI that wrote the report for the seller and so will go hire his or her own Home Inspector and get a new report anyway. But that is thinking from a dark spot way too deep in the box. The Home Inspection report done pre-listing does serve to augment the TDS but that benefit should not be seen as its primary value to the seller. The biggest benefit for the home seller (and agent) is a heads-up so that intelligent choices can be made to repair or replace something before a prospective buyer discovers it. All homes have their list of issues so a moderate list of items raised by the buyer’s HI is to be expected. But that big, overwhelming list, or the one that is short but has a major issue or two, turns the starry-eyed buyer into a fearful person who’s favorite word is “Whew!”. Suddenly, she wants to go be a renter. At some point, if the defect-list is lengthy, it can say to the prospective buyer that he seller hasn’t cared for the home.

There is a buyer for every home and certainly there are some buyers who are willing to buy a home with a long list of defects. They are not going to pay top dollar for a house though because those buyers are called, “Bargain Hunters”.

My job as a home stager IMHO is not about covering flaws and defects or creating rooms where there are none (I’ll leave that to the magicians and sorcerers…) Trying to convey (and educate) that to others is a tough job when they’ve had some poor experiences. A few bad apples do not spurl….

That being said I totally agree with what you wrote here:

“Maybe Stagers and Realtors and Home Inspectors ought to get together and strategize so that the best outcome is met for all”

I’m all about the team approach!

My objective in this post is not to necessarily target stagers, professional or otherwise, but to speak to the quarterback of the whole shebang, i.e., the RE agents. Agents run the show, set the pace, hire the stagers, the painters, landscapers and keep their finger on the pulse of the process. I don’t know what agents or stagers know and don’t try to do their job. Likewise I don’t expect them to have my perspective but c’mon! … most seasoned agents know when staging has gone beyond showing a place in its best light and turned into turning out the lights on what would otherwise be a sore thumb.

While we’re defining terms, let’s get clear about the word “defect”. “Defect”, to my inspector’s brain, refers to something that needs to be repaired or replaced because of a hazard,. failure or faulty installation. What does it mean to you? Hiding a defect is quite different from creating illusions about storerooms being habitable spaces. Both may be fraudulent, at least unscrupulous, but they are apples and oranges. Call me a nitpicker but I live by the words I use and it strikes me an important distinction.

Duggo: It is unfortunate that your friends purchased a home based upon its appearance and did not do their due diligence to make sure the home was in the condition it appeared to be in. Didn’t they have the home inspected by a professional home inspector? To portray the entire profession of home staging in a negative light because of a few bad experiences would be like portraying all architects as self-aggrandizing incompetents with no clue about how people actually live because I have been in a number of architect designed homes that were ugly and unlivable.

Home staging affords the home buyer an opportunity to see a home in its best possible light. I’m sure if you were selling your car, you would have it detailed, have the upholstery cleaned, the engine steam cleaned and any necessary repairs done, because you want to get the most money for it and you want to sell it as quickly as possible. Is that being dishonest because you are not selling your car as it looked everyday for the past 5 years, littered with fast food wrappers, coffee and ink stains on the upholstery, with that annoying oil leak apparent?

As an Architect you have been trained and educated to be able to discern the merits of a structure looking at it empty. Your training, however, puts you in the minority. Most home buyers become paralysed by the thought of figuring out how they would arrange their furniture in a home. I have seen time and again a home sell days or weeks after it had been staged, when it had sat for months on the market, vacant and empty. Did the Stager hide fatal flaws in the structure to make it sell? No, they just made the empty shell into a home that the home buyer could imagine themselves living in.

While I respect every opinion here, I don’t always agree.. and I still don’t.

It’s a question, really, of semantics…you say enlightening..i say masking.

let’s not drag this out, and just agree that I’m right.

[Editor's note: Duggo, shall we put the in for you at the end of your last sentence? ]

I don’t think staging is a new idea at all. New home builders have been using this technique for years to sell their homes in subdivisions across the country. It may be a newer idea in used homes. I also think that, as an architect you truly appreciate the architecture of the home and also that you have an eye for good design as every great architect does. But, not everyone is an architect or designer. In fact, I’d say that there is a majority of people who have trouble visualizing how a home will look when furnished. I don’t see it as a dumbing down of those folks, rather an enlightening. For instance, if a home has been being lived in by a small family and a stager can make it appealing to an older couple by furnishing a bit differently it really can add to the potential of the home.

staging didn’t really exist 5 years ago. now it’s the latest buzz. and I still say it is basically used to “mask defects” or rather “pump up” an average or even dump of a property. it’s a way to distract the viewer or buyer from really just seeing the property as it is..instead staging is trying to say…”oh, my look how pretty this house is…isn’t this a lovely property?”

and then you start to look more closely at the sagging floor joists, the leaky window frames (freshly painted of course), the toilet that rocks on its’ base, the stair without sufficient head room to meet the code, the bedroom with only one electrical outlet in the whole room, the downspout that drains directly onto the ground…etc, etc, etc..

i have seen this happen directly with various friends who have bought in SF…the house looked “fabulous” initially…they were wowed by the staging..and today they are stuck with a fixer that needs $100k of work.

nice.

I just recently held open a TIC on Parnassus St and the majority of poential buyers enjoyed that the space was not staged — it was occupied and being lived in by mom, dad, 2 daughters and nanny — it had clutter — but places to put that clutter. It showcased that a family could comfortably live in the space.

The super small bed is always worth a good chuckle — i crack up at the champagne breakfast in bed tray in the master bedroom – who really lives like that!