Homestaging - Help or Hindrance? You won't believe this story!

Here's the scenario:  I have a buyer looking for a home in an older area of the city where homes have a lot of character and neighborhoods have done a lot of work to keep that character within the neighborhood.  Listings are few and far between.

So a new listing comes on the market.  Listing agent describes it as a dream come true.  It goes on to describe the home features and it has features we're looking for so we set up a showing.  My client was getting excited because finding a decent listing in this particular area was difficult.  My first clue that something was weird was the line in the description that said "window coverings and hardware not included."  Now, I don't know about your market, but a home that is vacant (and this one was) includes the window coverings, and in any case, the hardware is attached and is now a fixture and should be included (unless the seller wants to repair the holes left when they take it down.)

We get to the house for the showing, notice the beautiful original fixture on the front of the house, the gorgeous brick, and with high hopes, open the door.  The first thing we see when we walk in is . . . a sign telling us who the home stager was along with her brochures.  What?   Am I viewing a home or a commercial.  So now I know why the window coverings and hardware don't stay.  They belong to the stager. 

We walk through the living room (where the pictures on the wall all have the stagers card in the frame) into the dining room and what do we see on the dining table ... more brochures and cards . . . for the stager.  Wait a minute are we selling a home here or the stager's services?  At this point we're annoyed.

We move into the kitchen and guess what?  More brochures!  At this point we have really stopped looking at the features of the home and started making comments on the staging.  With all the stuff she's brought in, the staging has gotten very distracting.  Would I have noticed the stuff if her brochures and cards hadn't been everywhere?  Probably not, but it's so "in your face" we can't help ourselves.  

The bedrooms are next and there is nothing in them.  They are also extremely tiny, actually just small, but they seem tiny because they are empty.  The bathroom is the last room on the main floor and, oh my, more cards in the bathroom.  I have to tell you, while the accessories in the bathroom would look fine in my 7 year old home, they do absolutely nothing for this vintage bathroom.

I understand the goal of homestaging.  It's to help the seller get the home sold quicker at a higher price.  In this case, it didn't help.  The homestager's self-promotion throughout the house was in the way.  Why the listing agent allowed it makes no sense.  Whether the homeowner knew it is unclear since they had already moved. 

And, by the way, no amount of staging is going to cover up the fact that the floor upstairs was put down on ceiling joists and not floor joists and needs to be torn up and reinforced.  That floor was a moving experience and the ceiling below would be also.  But that's why the buyer hired me and not the listing agent.