When you are selling your house, you want to make the home attractive to potential buyers and present it in such a way that they can picture the home as their own. Many sellers will professionally stage a home, as evidenced by the following “staging” we have recently come across.

Staging Example 1 – Gift Wrap Your Home

Who doesn’t love receiving gifts, particularly when wrapped with a bow? These porcelain “gifts” are yours if you purchase this home.

Staging Example 2 – Show Off Your Impressive Knick-Knacks

In a nod to the heavy concentration of Microsoft employees in our region, this seller left only these three knick-knacks behind to spice up their vacant condo. Two of them are Microsoft “Ship-It” Awards, while the third is a clock they received for 5 years of service at the company. As you can imagine, this sort of sparse decoration made a huge difference to our buyers!

Staging Example 3 – Accent the “Impressive” Features of Your Home

This home has an elaborate fireplace and mantel. What better place to put accents than on this mantel! From afar, we see something resting on the mantel. What could it be?

Zoom in a little closer and we find this fireplace is wonderfully adorned with a small plastic bird and a half roll of toilet paper. Very classy!

Stay tuned to the “Home Seller Hall of Shame” for future examples of excellent home selling techniques!

Today’s Home Seller Hall of Shame advertised “sophisticated decorative touches” in their flyer. I am not sure that I agree.

First, it totally lacked a kitchen sink.

One of the “decorative touches” was raw plywood countertops.

A kitchen like this apparently doesn’t need a dishwasher.

So where does the homeowner wash their dishes? The bathtub seems to be a great alternative.

Very interesting day for today's hall of shame entry, with photos from multiple properties.

The first entry is a “surprise” half bath. What appears to be a normal bedroom closet, opens to find a toilet and sink! It was so small that an adult would not necessarily fit!

The second entry comes to us from a home that advertised a “luxurious hot tub”. While we were there, two workers showed up to repossess the hot tub!

And our last entry came from a home that took some creative liberties with construction codes. Notice the plants next to the hot water tank? Yes, the tank was OUTSIDE!

Today’s hall of shame entry is a case of a poorly planned basement apartment. This home is a great looking Craftsman bungalow in a highly desirable neighborhood. For some reason, when they added the basement apartment, they decided to put the bathtub INSIDE the bedroom. In the picture, you’ll notice the bed on the left in full view of the bathtub. If you are considering a remodel such as this, I can pretty much guarantee that  integrating a bathtub directly into a bedroom is a turnoff for almost all buyers!

There are no pictures for today’s entry in the Hall of Shame. However, I came across the craziest of showing restrictions on a listing today. There is a home listed in Bellevue for under $250k, which is an exceptionally low price for this area. It isn’t the most exciting of ramblers, but at that price, I’m sure there will be lots of competition for it.

My clients expressed interest in seeing the home, but when I called for an appointment, I was told that the one hour showing period was already over. In order to see this home, you needed to be there between 9AM-10AM on just a single Thursday! They refuse to entertain any other showings, even though I have a buyer ready to make an offer! These sellers are in distress and are selling the home as a short sale, so I recognize that it isn’t fun to go through the process of selling a home where you lose money. However, you can’t possibly maximize your exposure to the market when the only showing is for one hour at 9AM on a weekday!

If you are a seller, you need to maximize buyer accessibility to your property, particularly if the home is priced aggressively enough to bring out competing offers.

We see properties that are for sale every day. It never ceases to amaze me that sellers (and possibly their agents) ignore some major issues that will prevent their home from selling, yet some of them are so easy to fix! This is my first entry in an ongoing “Hall of Shame” series of posts. As a seller, you have to pay attention to issues like this and get them fixed to sell your house.

I was previewing some properties in West Seattle this week. In what was an otherwise cute and moderately-priced bungalow, I found the following two issues. Needless to say, I won’t be taking my client by this particular home.

This bathtub had a plastic surround that was buckled. Out from behind was pouring black mold!

A little hard to see here, but the roof was covered in moss that was between 3”-5” tall!