The best time to sell a home is in a seller's market. The seller can dictate many terms and usually get very close to the asking price. Many other advantages...but mostly just more flexibility.
Selling in a buyer's market is a different situation. Not advantageous: lots of other homes on the market and excessively discriminating buyers. Combining this with an unsteady economic environment results in a situation fraught with distress for the seller.
By far, the worst part of selling in a buyer's market has to be a process called staging. In a post about Home Staging, Elizabeth Weintraub of About.com describes it as "...illusions...the way David Copperfield would sell a house." She further says "it makes home buyers want to buy it" and "it's all about dressing the house for sale...adding the small details." It even has an association related to it: Real Estate Staging Association (RESA).
Sounds great, eh? It may be, until you are immersed in it. The stager who came to my house was very pleasant. She brought her daughter with her, and of course my real estate agent joined our little party.
After the pleasantries, she got to work.
She told me to remove my prized cathedral photographs from the living room wall. She said the buyer needs a cleaner view of the beautiful patio and pool. I did not object; nevertheless, I could not resist informing her that those were not just something I had bought at Bed, Bath & Beyond for $55. I had taken those myself, in various cities in Europe. I made sure she knew how much I prized them.
She told me to remove my Holland mementoes off my piano and my armoire. She said the buyer needs to see a clear visual space so she can form a better view of what could be. Again, I did not object; however, was she (or even the "buyer") aware that one of those tiles is over 250 years old? Or that those large matching tile mosaics and copper tea kettles are antiques that I bought in various antique shops and markets in The Hague and in Delft.
She told me to rearrange the furniture in my childrens' bedrooms. She said it will open up the room and give the buyer a better image of what the room could hold. Still not objecting. OK, maybe a little when she made us, and my son, shift the bed in my daughter's room...2 inches. She did not seem to care that the bed was already precariously assembled and that the movement might dislodge something that would result in the bed dropping to the floor one night at 2 a.m.
She told me to remove my family photographs from the hallway leading up to the second floor. She said that any images of family life distract the buyer, possibly even forcing her to lose focus on the goal.
OK...enough. That is where I drew the line. We still live in this house and I refuse to take down my family pictures because someone does not have the vision to look past them. If that is the case, they do not need to be buying my house.
There were many other changes; most superfluous and more annoying than heart-wrenching.
As the stager went through my house room by room, view by view, I couldn't help but get the feeling that my personality was being suppressed in my own house in order to elevate the capability of the potential buyer. A buyer who, in my opinion minute after excruciating minute of this staging ordeal, was appearing to me like a sheep, a lemming, or any other animal that can be categorized as not having a mind of its own. A follower, a herd animal, that has to be told what to think, coddled into seeing a vision that has been artificially created for her.
As I delve deeper with the stager into corners and nooks of my home, a home I have spent time organizing into a meaningful pattern, inserting who I am and what I believe into every element of its design, with the stager who is bound to reverse and overwrite that pattern because buyers cannot see past it.
I couldn't help but think that in this buyers' market that every house has to be a model home, devoid of personality, perfect, creative in a lackluster way. But, if this is what we have to do to our homes in order to sell them, what does that say about the buyers out there that expect that? Like a drug, they have lost creative thought, imagination, any ability to look past a veneer and into the structure and to apply their own reality to what they see instead of being confused by trying to squeeze their blue accessories into the gold room in front of them. Instead of opening their mind and empowering their individuality, they now are forced to rely on their environment conforming to them. But, not only are they forced, but somehow at the same time they can demand that.
Staging endows them with the ability to tell their broker that everything was fine with the house but I couldn't figure out how to make my pink oriental rug fit into the red dining room. Hello.....it's called paint.
Really people. This is what is going on. Sheep are taking over. Sheep who cannot think on their own; sheep who latch onto a sheep dog or other leader, who does have the vision, and can stage their environment for them. But does that really mean they have more power. Just because they can pay cash for the purchase?
They may be able to command the attention of the market, of the agents, but bottom line they have sold their souls to do so.
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