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dug up this old post. any updated thoughts/responses?
we have a large beautifully furnished home. we will be downsizing into a brand new smaller home. we will not be taking anything with us except maybe 1 couch and dinette set for the new basement and our grand piano that is now in it's own conservatory/room. we have have online photos and video tour as per our realtor, showing all the room furnished. all of our rooms are painted neutrally with crown moldings, chair rails, picture moldings, recessed lights, hardwood floors. all the draperies, window coverings, and light fixtures will stay. we hired an estate tag sale company to run the sale of furniture and knick knacks. not sure how that works other than they say can sell everything and they work off of flat commission. the new house will be ready to move in before the estate sale. our house is not sold yet, still getting showings even thru the holidays, but no contract yet. Just wondering if i should push off the tag sale until after we have a contract. our home listing doesn't expire until May, strong Spring market, but we will be able to live in our new house full time before than. the two houses are about 15 miles apart.
Please let me know of experiences on estate tag sales, an about furnished vs unfurnished house for sale.
thanks!
Some people want to see how furniture fits.
Some people want to see it empty.
I say go for the staged look using your own furniture.
This means removing about 2/3 of the stuff in the house.
It won't look normal and it is not supposed to.
Hire a staging expert for a few hundred dollars.
You may even want to spend some ($200 or less) on some staging items. For example, when we sold my father-in-law's house, we put a red-checkered, Italian restaurant style table cloth on a table with plastic bread and a Chianti bottle. It helped sell the house according to the buyer.
I always prefer to see an empty house. I have unusual taste in furniture, so seeing the home staged with boring modern furniture gives the whole house a boring modern feel. No matter what the buyer's taste is, I think that seeing a house staged with furniture they find unappealing can give the house a more unappealing atmosphere. Leaving it empty allows me to more easily imagine where I would put my own furniture, and that gives me a little extra emotional investment in considering the house seriously.
I prefer an empty house over cluttered. A staged home can be great, but I prefer empty. But, that said, I ended up buying a lived in home that was owned by an interior decorator. I wanted all of the furnishings to stay! LOL
I think you at least need to leave furniture until the pictures are taken. Even if you have furniture that has seen better days, it wont necessarily show up that way in the pics as long as you remove all the clutter and make sure your house is spotlessly clean.
Empty rooms tend to look smaller. Same if they are stuffed with furniture.
Clean with spare furnishings and minimal decorating touches/art imo. Let your homes good features shine through......wood floors without rugs covering them, window mouldings without heavy drapes obscuring them and light, etc.
In my last sale our house was empty as we had moved on. Our buyers said they were impressed that they could look in every nook and cranny. They loved how clean the place was and it what great condition it was in. Being empty helped sell them.
We had had a top to bottom professional cleaning done. Also had paint work touched up and carpets cleaned. Realtor made sure the place stayed spotless. I visited every week or so.
I was empty when selling and brought in a stager. I had her stuff in for 1 week and decided to yank it. Why? It was unbelievably cheap. The beds were actually air mattresses that weren't holding their air. I found her accessories tacky (like a basket of giant plastic pears on the ledge of the kitchen window), but I would have been ok with them since I assume the stager knows more about neutral design than I do. However, the accessories were also cheap, all looked like they came from a dollar store. The tacky pears I mentioned above had obviously been dropped and were dented all over. A giant platter that had a visible crack was set on top of an IKEA dining table that looked like a toddler had gone to town on it with a key. After a week, I decided it wasn't the message I wanted to send to the buyers.
I'd rather show empty than fill the house with cheap and damaged furnishings. Just one more thing that will distract the buyers.
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Two types of people
