They also rent furniture out, some of the larger companies have warehouses full, so you can stage an empty house. They try and stage the house to appeal to the type of person who would be buying in that area/price range etc.

These days it seems to be well worth the money. Apparently staged houses sell faster and for more.

I think its the sofas in the sitting room that are wrong. The key selling point about the sitting room has to be the doors out (OK may not be doors, but large window) and the light and the views out. These are all blocked by the large sofa against it. I would get a few chairs or move the wooden unit etc. Fire needs picture not telly.

I would restage this room, the office and the master bedroom. The office looks cluttered and canadians may prefer a family room. Canadians also like grand beds and your bed isn't grand enough.

Gryph

They may like grand beds but they obviously don't put them to enough use given that they need immigrants to maintain the population Must be intimidated by the grandness of the beds

Its just too exspensive to have kids these days....I am 30 but wont have any, simply for financial reasons....Unless of course I start making a high income.....

That's backwards. I would not have been driven to make a high income had I not had the kids. Now that they're gone I'm no longer driven to make the income as I need less money to stay out of the bankruptcy court.

The idea of buying that house is, btw, completely alien to me. I wouldn't want to live in a subdivision, I wouldn't want a new house. For that kind of money I'd want either land, land enough for a horse, ideally with an older house, or convenience, walking distance to downtown, subway at the door, that kind of thing. I suspect that these are attitudes shared by many European immigrants. I think you might do best to try and peddle the McMansion to immigrants from Asia, accordingly I'd look at having it staged with lots of red and brocade, something between knocking shop and curry house.

We bought our house in 2007. We still live in the UK so the list of houses to view during our visit was done by viewing the MLS listings. We gave our buying agent the list and she arranged the viewings over two days. She slotted in some houses that fitted in with the route and times. We ended up buying a house I had not liked from the MLS listing pictures which I now think was due to the horrid furniture, dark and old, but house was fantastic and really light when we went in.

So I would say invest in the staging costs so you get the wow factor in the pictures for people like me viewing from afar.

Chris

I admire your optimism. In the Calgary area you would need well over a milliion for those sort of things.

Then I doubly perplexed that people choose to live there. Each to their own I suppose but if you have a million dollars to spend on a house you can live in England, there's no need to be in Canada at all. If you are willing to live in Canada and you have a million dollars you can look at any city so the choice of Calgary leaves me scratching my head.

It keeps the neighbours at arms length. We have 0.8acres, and its a perfect size for us, room for a trampoline and pool, and a rink in the winter, and plenty of space for me to practice my golf or for the kids to kick a ball around without endangering anyone else.

Exactly the point. Had we been staying we would probably installed a pool for the couple of months that you can use each year it plus it would still have plenty of room for the kids and dog to play. In a country the size of Canada it is really bizarre that they build so many detached houses in which you can virtually lean out of a window and touch the neighbours house.

There is only so much land and look at the urban sprawl that major Canadian cities are now especially Calgary.

If you want larger lots then find a home built prior to the mid 1970's or as in cases like yourself buy an acreage.

But England is full of chavs and is run by a group of idiots who will leave you with very little of your million dollars.

A million dollars is sadly not an enormous amount of money these days so you still have to work. If you work in the oil industry then you don't have that much choice if you discount Halifax and Fort Mac.

If you are an outdoors type of person, especially for Winter sports, then Calgary really does have a tremendous amount going for it. We would have prefered Vancouver but Toronto would have filled us with horror. So each to his own.

Interestingly most of the houses in our development have been sold to people moving away from the hassles of an acreage but who don't want city/town living.

As an aside...I presume since they changed the location of the "Training Area" for Springbank Airport that you see much fewer aircraft over the lake.

Ouch. I appreciate that they may not be to the taste of the local population who seem to like their bedrooms to look like tart's boudoir but we like pine furniture because it is bright and cheerful. It is also quite good quality and certainly not the cheap B&Q type budget stuff.

Be careful be before using the word cheap. A more careful selection of words would not cause offense. Also bear in mind that although the house may be comparitively upmarket, people can go through different stages of life, some of which leave you skint and unable to afford top of the range furniture. All because you can afford to replace an item with a more up market version does not mean that it should just be discarded. It's the throw away attitude of many people combined with easy credit that has brought the financial world to it's knees.

Fume over Thanks to all for all the other comments though. We will take on board what we can.