Sometimes I wonder about realtors... (Chester, Springfield: relocation, real estate, work)

[Sassygirl18]

Our house is currently on the market so over the past couple months, I've been browsing a lot of real estate listings, keeping my eye on the inventory in several of the towns we are interested in and familiarizing myself with what's available in these areas.

I am frequently amazed by how realtors list many of the homes. First of all, they post photos of a home that is in complete disarray - beds unmade, junk all over the place, massive amounts of clutter. Why don't these realtors coach their clients about staging or at the minimum cleaning up the place? When they are snapping those photos, don't they realize that photos of a home that looks like a disaster area are not going to attract customers? I mean, isn't this real estate 101?

I've seen photos of bedrooms painted in flourescent colors, photos with pets in them, homes with personal photos all over the walls (which everyone knows is a no-no), PEOPLE in the photos (watching t.v. or hanging around) - all things that would be easy to correct.

The other things that drive me crazy about real estate listings are listings that have no photo of the exterior front of the house (what are they hiding?), or instead of a photo of the exterior, they'll post a closeup photo of the front door only. WTF?

And then they list twins as single family homes ALL THE TIME. This is rampant. And it's deceiving because many twins LOOK like single family homes from the front photo.

Feel free to add to my vent.

[sbhubbell]

This post would probably be better in the real estate forum. However! I second your observations. I found this phenomenon to be even worse in Houston, like every Joe Schmo here has decided to become a realtor and has no idea how to market a house! I spent a lot of time reading up on staging and watching all the HGTV shows, and my house sold before it even went on the market, thanks to a realtor who was a very good networker. I'm proof positive staging WORKS.

When searching for houses online for our relocation from Philly to Houston I found it very hard to see through the clutter in so many photos. And if they didn't show the front of the house I figured there must be a problem with it. Walking through 20 homes in one day (whirlwind househunting trip) I could totally tell who had put the effort into removing all personal photos, cleaning, placing flower arrangements around. It showed and made a big difference.

[orrmobl]

Unfortunately Sassy, you are shopping in the low end of the market and as a result the clientele have neither time/money/expertise/motivation/brains to stage and the realtors are just as bad. The front door pics either mean the front of the house/yard are a mess or the neighbor's houses are dumps...but no matter how good or bad pics look, if the stuff you like is there and the price is right, you have to go look - you may just luck out with a place that is really great but the pics scared other people off...

I completely staged my home and it was always spotless, heck I even showed the place as I was home with the kids and my realtor kind of sucked.

Where are you looking? I just found a new realtor and she is great if you need a good buyers agent...

[Sassygirl18]

It's funny that our price range is "low end of the market". I don't think of it that way because it's not low end where I live now, but I am coming to terms with the fact that we are going to have to settle for much less of a house when we move to PA than what we have now.

We're still tossing around a number of areas. They all are lovely areas with pros and cons that we are weighing. Our favorite areas so far are Wynnewood, Media, Jenkintown, Elkins Park (we'd have to find a really low-priced house here, though, since the taxes are very high) and West Chester. Our second tier favorite towns (probably more affordable for us, but not as appealing as the first tier) are Abington/Glenside, Springfield, Havertown. Really, we would prefer an old-fashioned Main Street town, or a town that is right next to a Main Street town that is solidly middle to upper middle class area. As you know, schools are not an issue to us since we do not have, or plan to have, kids.

We will eventually need a realtor in PA so I'd love to get the name of yours...can you PM me? What towns/area(s) does specialize in?

[ooodsie]

I am a realtor and this kind of stuff frustrates me to no end.. I would NEVER put up photos of a house that didnt appear professional. I would never have clutter, people, pets in the photos.. NEVER. I would rather have NO interior photos than to have bad ones. And whenever I have a client looking for a home, if the listing has no photo of the outside, I immediately assume it must be in ROUGH shape.. Same goes for no photos of the inside - I assume its a fixer upper. It's very frustrating as a realtor to see the shape of some of these listings on the MLS - poorly formatted, bad photos, misspellings, bad descriptions.. It's horrible.

[MoorestownResident]

Originally Posted by Sassygirl18

Our house is currently on the market so over the past couple months, I've been browsing a lot of real estate listings, keeping my eye on the inventory in several of the towns we are interested in and familiarizing myself with what's available in these areas.

I am frequently amazed by how realtors list many of the homes. First of all, they post photos of a home that is in complete disarray - beds unmade, junk all over the place, massive amounts of clutter. Why don't these realtors coach their clients about staging or at the minimum cleaning up the place? When they are snapping those photos, don't they realize that photos of a home that looks like a disaster area are not going to attract customers? I mean, isn't this real estate 101?

I've seen photos of bedrooms painted in flourescent colors, photos with pets in them, homes with personal photos all over the walls (which everyone knows is a no-no), PEOPLE in the photos (watching t.v. or hanging around) - all things that would be easy to correct.

The other things that drive me crazy about real estate listings are listings that have no photo of the exterior front of the house (what are they hiding?), or instead of a photo of the exterior, they'll post a closeup photo of the front door only. WTF?

And then they list twins as single family homes ALL THE TIME. This is rampant. And it's deceiving because many twins LOOK like single family homes from the front photo.

Feel free to add to my vent.

They do that because the house doesn't have curb appeal or they are morons which is just as likely. About 10% of realtors out there are competent. It's the old 10/90 rule - 10% get 90% of the business.