I totally understand refusing to pay $4.00 for a sausage outside the Skydome when you can get a perfectly good hot dog for $3.00.

There is a time to be frugal, and a time to be downright cheap.

But selling your home is not one of those times, and I swear on my sauerkraut that you’ll notice a difference in your pocket when all is said and done…

Perhaps this lesson should be told to two parties instead of just one: property sellers and their agents.

I spend money to make money.

I’ll gladly pay for a staging consultation and a home inspection as part of my listing service in order to obtain the listing in the first place.

I’ll gladly pay a professional photographer to come in to the house or condo and take pictures, rather than taking them on my Canon Powershot that is the favourite of both Realtors and 14-year-old girls.

But unfortunately, many Realtors in the city think it’s okay to list a property on MLS with “PHOTO NOT AVAILABLE” as the caption.

And you know what?  I’m sorry to say, but I put ALL the blame on the seller for hiring that Realtor in the first place.

I was called in to a listing presentation this week for a condo on Richmond Street West.

The seller had been there for almost five full years, and was going to see more than a six-figure return on the sale of her property.

I went through my listing presentation, and the seller continuously shook her head and laughed at some of my suggestions.

It was like prom night all over again…

I told her that one of my services was to bring in a staging expert for a complimentary consultation, and she could take all of his ideas, or none.  She could spend $10,000 or $40.

She said, “That’s about forty dollars more than I’m going to spend.”

I told her that I fully understood and that while some people pay to paint, rent furniture, and strategically place everything from the salad fork to the fresh cut flowers, other people buy some Glade-Plug-Ins and call it a day.

But she responded, “Let me make something clear: I’m not going to spend a penny to sell this condo.  In fact, all of the things you say you’re going to pay for; well, I’d rather you don’t pay for them, and then you just charge me a lower commission.”

I asked her somewhat facetiously, “Do you want to get top dollar for your condo?”

She said, “yes.”

I asked her, “Would you accept less than fair market value for your condo?”

She said, “no.”

So I asked her to go through my suggestions one at a time.

First, I wanted to bring in a professional photographer to take photos.  She said that she had a steady hand and could operate a camera as best as the next person.  She said “photography” as a profession was a joke.  I know a girl that would strongly disagree…

There’s nothing worse than loading up the nine photos that MLS allows you to upload and seeing six photos of the building amenities, one photo of the outside of the building, one photo of the kitchen in the unit, and then a gorgeous shot of the porcelain-God and the shower curtain.

Spend $150 and get some professional photos taken.  Do you have your own wide-angle-lens?  Do you know what that even is?  I answer “no” on both, and I stick to selling real estate.

As for staging, I suggested that we move out some of her “bulky” items such as her china hutch.  She said, “People aren’t buying my china; they’re buying my condo.”  I told her, “Well, as long as that four-by-six china hutch is taking up space in your 670 square foot condo, no they won’t.”

She had no locker in the building so I suggested she rent a small storage space for two weeks to store her larger items such as her china hutch, the huge Lazy-Boy, her “extra” dining room table (for some reason she had two), all three of her book-cases in the den, and at least one of her three dressers.

She asked me, “Are you going to pay for the storage locker and help me move out all my stuff?”

I think I said something like, “I’m busy that day…”

She happened to have a “feature wall” in her bedroom that was black.  No, her fingernails weren’t black and neither was her eye-shadow, but she had a black wall, for some reason or another.

I told her that she had to paint this wall, and if she was going to paint this wall, she’d have to paint the whole room.

But to my surprise (or lack thereof at this point…) not only did she refuse to hire a painter to come in and tackle the black monster, but she wouldn’t even buy a can of paint and a brush herself!  She said, “There’s no way I’m going to get any value-add from a few cans of paint.”

MY……how I beg to differ!

Some people just can’t be convinced no matter how hard you try.

I can rest on my laurels and tout my sales stats but this would-be seller was convinced that she didn’t need to put a single penny into her condo in order to get it ready to show.

There were so many “little things” wrong with the place as well.

She had installed her own curtains and for some reason she went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of utility handles and just stuck them to the ceiling over the window!  They weren’t even proper curtain-hooks!  I told her that it looked “cheap” and buyers would likely paint the whole condo with that “cheap” brush, but she brushed aside my comment.

It’s like having a beautiful Sony flat-screen TV on the wall compared to having a JVC from 1988 sitting on the floor.  Buyers just assign a higher value to a condo that looks nicer, in every single way.

This seller didn’t understand how her dollar-store utility handles glued to the ceiling might diminish the “showing power” of the condo, compared to, say a beautiful set of curtains from the Hunter Douglas Shade Shop.

I’ve had sellers spend months getting their properties ready for sale.

One of my clients spent $75,000 staging and upgrading his $2,000,000 house to get it ready to show – and he received multiple offers.

I’m not saying that every house or condo needs a complete overhaul in order to get it ready to “show,” but I certainly think that even the cleanest and most obsessive-compulsive property-owners will need to do a little tinkering at some level.

And why would anybody risk tens-of-thousands of dollars in profit on their property by not spending a few hundred dollars on things that I, in my professional opinion, deem are must-do’s?

Well, it takes all kinds….I guess.

I believe there is a blueprint for selling your house or condo, and I expect my sellers to follow it.

If they don’t, then I’m not doing my job.

And if I’m not doing my job, then they shouldn’t be hiring me.