Why Your Listing Photos Aren’t Converting (And How Staging Fixes That) With Fred Glick of Arrivva

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Why your home may be sitting longer than it should, even in a strong market
• What staging really changes for buyers and why it matters more than most sellers think
• Why some staging quotes are wildly overpriced and what to watch out for
• How to stage only what counts without wasting money on long contracts
• What smart sellers do after photos are taken to keep costs under control
• How a lower offer can still win when the terms are cleaner and the process is stronger

In this episode with Fred Glick

In this episode of We Fixed Real Estate, Fred Glick of Arrivva reveals the real reason your home is not selling and it is not the market, it is your listing photos and how the property is presented online.

Learn why poor listing photos fail to convert buyers, how strategic staging transforms photos that drive clicks and showings, how to avoid overpriced $10K+ staging contracts, which rooms actually matter most, and why a short-term staging strategy can save money while increasing your sale price. Fred also explains how furniture included in a home sale can impact taxes and fees, plus a real case study where stronger presentation, fewer contingencies, and a fully underwritten mortgage beat out a lower offer.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Fred Glick on LinkedIn
• Arrivva
• Arrivva Active Listings
• Claude AI by Anthropic
• Thumbtack (service provider marketplace for stagers, inspectors, and more)

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Welcome to the latest episode of We Fixed Real Estate. Today, we are going to delve deep into the art of staging your home. Fred, illuminate us.

[00:00:31] Fred Glick: Thank you, Drew. Drew’s got computer problems, so you go back and dig in and I’ll just do some talking. Ah, hey everybody. So staging, I have this absolutely awesome house.

God, I’m talking like every real estate agent. ” Oh, my listing is so beautiful. It’s gorgeous. Oh, it’s divine. It’s the most magnificent listing in the history of the world.” Oh, God. Anyway, it’s cool house. It’s in a great area. And Los Feliz, this, Los Feliz, however you want to pronounce it, I don’t care. Close to Silver Lake.

And especially close to the Los Angeleses. So I’m saying that right? No, the worst parking lot in the city of Los Angeles or in the Los Angeles County, let’s put it that way.

They asked this question of celebrities in one of the award shows on the red carpet.

So, and they all, like eight outta 10 of them said this, the Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake.

[00:01:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh.

[00:01:35] Fred Glick: It is a nightmare. And right across the street from Gelson’s. The traffic there, the pattern is just insanity. So the good news is with this house, it’s only two blocks away, so you don’t ever have to park there ever again.

That’s worth, I don’t know, 50 grand, less aggravation. Anyway. So I have these sellers and you know, they’re very cool and they kind of, they’re the kind of sellers who wanna keep involved, which is fine. I like that. So we’re all on the same page. We all agree on things. We all do everything. So she wanted to pick out the stager.

Which I said, “Fine, fine with me.” Because I don’t have a person, because you never know when furniture’s gonna be available. Who’s gonna, who’s gonna have the right price? Every area’s different, every house is different. Every amount of furniture’s different. So you kind of have to start from scratch on every one of them.

[00:02:36] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Also regional. I mean, you’re gonna have,

[00:02:38] Fred Glick: Yeah.

[00:02:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: There’s not a California wide staging there.

[00:02:41] Fred Glick: No, no such thing. They’re all pretty local. There, there are, there is no, like, big staging company.

So it’s, it’s just a lot of, you know, moving stuff around, storing stuff, buying stuff, fixing stuff, et cetera. So, you know, it’s a real business anyway. So I’d gotten a recommendation of a stager from another agent that I knew, as a matter of fact, the listing agent on the house that my client bought. And she gave me this person and they come up with a number, like $11,000 for 1,000,007 listing of 2045 square feet.

It’s like, thank you, bye. So then we started hunting out these people and found them on websites somewhere. I don’t even know where she did find them. You know, I try to go, I try to tell people to use Thumbtack. I use them for inspectors, termite inspectors, those kind of guys. It’s great ’cause you get like five people and you can choose.

So I don’t know where she got them from, but she started calling. And these people, they all had different things, different methods of communication. It was just, it just an utter mishmash. And we finally picked somebody out, got the furniture, everything’s fine.

But I did a little deeper research. I went into our friends at Claude. So I threw it into Claude and talking about staging, gave it the address, the whole nine yards. Well, it’s something really interesting. It’s like, don’t find stagers for, you know, months, you know, for whatever their contract is. Say, “Look, I wanna get the best staging ’cause I’m gonna sell this house in 30 days.” So we, we can guarantee you pick it up and then 35 days later you can pick it up. I mean, drop it off and then pick it up and you can then send it somewhere else for 90 days.

They all like to have these 90 day contracts. They also said you, you need the living room and the standard house. You need the living room, the kitchen, the main bedroom. That’s it. Everything else, maybe you can have a little desk in there, but those are the places that people concentrate on.

You wanna make them the best and make it minimalistic. You don’t need to put a lot of stuff, you just need to kind of show where things will go and how they’ll match. That’s pretty much it. So it was a pretty interesting thing. SoBut as for finding people, it’s all over the map. I mean, there’s 15 million ways to do it between talking to the agent, looking on Yelp, Google, just Google, Facebook, searching, whatever. So I came up with this idea.

Yesterday, I said to myself, this is a pain in the ass and no one has fixed it and there’s too many places all over and oh, and like these other people, they would text me pictures or email me pictures. It was just hard to keep on track. ‘Cause not everybody’s on Slack. That’s my wish in this business that everybody is on Slack, make things much easier.

So I came up with this idea of a website where you as a seller or an agent, can put the property up, put all kinds of information, pictures, videos, et cetera, et cetera, and then the stagers would come in and bid on the staging. Show you pictures of what would look like. We can even get AI into this if people took a, took when they uploaded the pictures, you know, you’d be able to do the digital staging. It’s automatically based on the furniture that the stager has into the app, and then it can just generate it.

So that’s kind of a 2.0 idea, but then the stagers would bid. I don’t know how the money would work. But it seemed to be a pretty good thing. And I went ahead. I have zero capabilities everybody, just, nothing. I do not code. Okay. I am codeless, I’m a creative. It’s, sorry. You got, you let one brain or the other. But I went through Claude slowly and surely, and it helped me build this site.

So Drew and I were talking on the pre-show, that 80% of it’s probably done, but 20% isn’t. And the last 20 percent’s the hardest.

[00:07:12] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Always the hardest.

[00:07:14] Fred Glick: Why?

[00:07:15] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It’s the details. Because you see that, you see, you saw all the, the wire frame set up. You saw a thing that looks like it works, but how does the accounting work?

How does the submitting process work? I mean, just kind of go through the nitty gritty parts and then also, especially with some of these language models, it starts hallucinating towards the end and you’ll vibe, you could vibe code your way 85% of the way there, and then all of a sudden you’ve just vibe coded your way back and it just becomes unusable and not what you originally wanted, and it’s hard to get it back to where it was.

[00:07:51] Fred Glick: Wow. That’s crazy that it’s, it’s not really programmed, it just came to that conclusion, I guess.

It’s so weird.

[00:08:03] Drew Thomas Hendricks: But all your code files are there and he is gotta make sure that all those code files stay, stay intact.

[00:08:09] Fred Glick: Right.

[00:08:09] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And get it under version control. So as Claude’s updating the code, you can always roll it back to different versions.

[00:08:17] Fred Glick: Yeah, I saw that there was a big button that said rollback or something like that in there somewhere. So cool. So that’s what I’m trying to come up with for stagers. I mean, people have had, we could go deeper into this of how it works, but, you know, get the house clean first, then bring in the stagers.

That’s an important thing to know. Try to get the minimal amount of time because

[00:08:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, because if you sign a 90 day contract and you sell the house in 30 days, they could technically then go resell the same stuff like three times.

[00:08:54] Fred Glick: Double dipping. Yeah. Exactly. So try to negotiate 30 days, you know, I’m gonna sell this house in 30 days.

I don’t want this stuff in here more than 30 days because at the 30 day point you got a problem. You’ve either listed it too high a price, and so nobody’s gonna see it. Or it’s just in one of those markets, it’s gonna take forever.

Sell. So you stage it, take pictures with it. Then day 31, you get rid of the staging and the, that’s when you make the digital staging. Or you take the pictures, you blow them up, you put them on an awning.

[00:09:29] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh.

[00:09:29] Fred Glick: Or, you know, kind of a thing. Not awning, I mean a,

[00:09:33] Drew Thomas Hendricks: An  easel. 

[00:09:34] Fred Glick: Easel. Thank you. Awning. Put it on an easel, even in each room to show what it, what it looks like.

[00:09:42] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, that’s nice.

[00:09:42] Fred Glick: So get a nice visual that way. And then you don’t need 90 days of staging.

[00:09:48] Drew Thomas Hendricks: What percentage of your listings did the, did the clients want to have him staged versus just virtually?

[00:09:55] Fred Glick: Well, to be honest, the one we have in San Francisco, he wanted to go with a high price where everything was going crazy about a month and a half ago without staging. And I said, “Dude, you really should.” And now we’ve lowered the price significantly. And we’ve staged it. It’s, people are finally realizing. People don’t have imagination. That’s the problem.

And the other thing we, we go with a fixed fee, but we can’t have a fixed fee that includes staging because every house is completely different.

[00:10:27] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah.

[00:10:28] Fred Glick: You know, five bedroom, four bath, giant place, you know, the burbs compared to a studio apartment, it’s, you don’t need as much.

[00:10:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And then the level of staging too, like the

[00:10:40] Fred Glick: Right fancier or can be funky or you know, contemporary. So yeah, that’s gonna change.

So it’s a hard thing, but it really is necessary. And it’s not because of you, it’s not because of the agent, it’s because of the buyers.

People just don’t have the capabilities to figure it out. Unless it’s an absolutely insane market, you know, like Cupertino, where you’re gonna get 500 bids anyway. But I’m talking about in general. Even in the little nicer homes where it’s not killer, but if you do stage it, you’re probably going to get better money. That’s the other thing. It just, it shows better. People have this relief, “Oh, I can just move in.”

You know, it helps to bid it up. The prettier, the better. That’s the bottom line.

[00:11:36] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Have you ever sold a house that was staged? And then people are like, I just wanna buy everything that’s in this house right now.

[00:11:41] Fred Glick: Actually, it is available at some stagers. I’ve never had anybody wanna buy it all. Some people wanna buy a couple pieces. I’m surprised I never had a buy all but.

[00:11:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I would think it would be like vacation homes. Like you’re up.

[00:11:55] Fred Glick: Yeah.

[00:11:56] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Lake house comes with all the kitschy lake house furniture and stuff.

[00:12:00] Fred Glick: I had clients that just bought a place in San Diego where everything was included. And here’s another guide, guys. Let’s say you find a place like that, you’re not getting a mortgage. ‘Cause I’ll go into what Jeff do for a mortgage with this. With a mortgage, what you have to do is say to them, the price is a million dollars and we’re transferring all of the furniture and personal property at no cost.

[00:12:25] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Mm.

[00:12:26] Fred Glick: Because if you don’t put that, the lender’s gonna ask for an inventory and an appraisal of every little piece of furniture. So, but if you’re paying cash, here’s the way to do it. Come up with a, a number, what the value of this stuff is between you and the seller. Let’s say it’s 50 grand.

So what you do is you don’t have the sale price at a million, you have the sale price at 950 and a conveyance of personal property for $50,000. You know, it’s got a really B $50,000 worth of stuff, generically. I mean, nobody’s gonna know the exact price, but it’s ballpark. This way, the 950 is your sale price. The transfer tax is based on that. The title insurance is based on that percentage.

Commissions are usually based on that, so everybody’s saving money. And the future real estate taxes are based on that. So the future money is cheaper for everybody. And the current money obviously too. The seller mostly.

So, and it’s your basis for your capital gain later down the road. So you might not want to do it on an investment property unless your accountant can depreciate these personal property or deduct it right away, or, I don’t know, talk to your accountant about that. But it’s usually better to separate it out.

It happens at resorts all the time, you know?

[00:13:50] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah, that makes sense.

[00:13:51] Fred Glick: Yeah. So there you go.

So that’s all I have on staging, I’m sure we could go on and there’s plenty of staging stories, both good and bad, but speaking of good.

 I’ve over the years complained about agents and the stupid things that they do and the AOL accounts and all that stuff. But I actually had a fantastic transaction with an agent. And the buyers were great. And they were, you know, we came up with a plan and it worked and the way it worked, this agent understood it. So they, we had the buyer, the seller pay just our commission, 9750. So it wasn’t two and a half.

And because of that, even with the net price, and this agent was smart enough to figure out net price,  and we bid aggressively, we had no contingencies ‘ cause they had a fully underwritten mortgage. Went through the inspections. There were some issues, but we like put it through the ai. She contacted a couple of people. She was comfortable with the issues. And we did not have an appraisal contingency. We won this bid because the, there was another bid a little bit higher than us, but they had an appraisal contingency.

So let me tell you why that’s a wrong thing to do, people. Number one, the property will appraise because you know what? There are, it’s, this is in San Jose where there’s plenty of bids. There’s plenty. The market’s strong, it’s fine. Because appraisers can make adjustments for what they call time adjustments.

And okay, in the last month, stuff has gone up $50,000 and we can see by the activity and blah, blah, blah. So it’s an, it’s a narrative. It’s not a, it’s not a finite appraisal, is not a finite thing. It’s somebody’s opinion of value. So that’s how they do it to justify it. That’s number one. And I told my buyer that and she understood it.

And the other agent put this in not knowing this, probably number one. And number two, there’s a game that some people play. Hey, let’s go high and get it under contract and then renegotiate with them when the appraisal comes in lower.

[00:16:23] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh.

[00:16:24] Fred Glick: Well it doesn’t work in this market. Okay. It usually doesn’t work in any market.

‘Cause you’re gonna pay what’s worth paying? And it comes in a couple thousand dollars, you know? Big deal.

[00:16:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I guess that’ll work in a slow market. I mean, I don’t, I really don’t know why you would do that.

[00:16:39] Fred Glick: Yeah, because you’re gonna make a low bid in a slow market anyway, and it’s, you know.

[00:16:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: House is a million and you come in 1.2 million knowing it’s only gonna appraise for a million.

But they accept your offer for 1.2, and then it apprais at a million. So then they renegotiate down to a million?

[00:16:55] Fred Glick: If they had an appraisal contingency. Yeah. I mean, either get out of the deal completely or renegotiate.

So then you make the argument, “Hey, you know, everybody’s gonna have this problem,” blah, blah, blah.

The comps aren’t there. You know, and, and there’s insane sellers who want certain prices, but in this case, it’s, you know, it’s insane. Dunno what else to say, but yeah.

Anyway, so then going through the deal, once we got under contract, we used her escrow title company, which combined companies, not like Southern California. I wasn’t worried about the fees ’cause they’re all basically the same up there. Everybody’s the same. And the escrow went through right away. The escrow deposit, my buyer started on the mortgage. Everything. The appraiser got there two days later. We had a couple of questions about a couple of little things.

We sent out our utility form. They filled it out right away. We sent out a form to the listing agent. You know, let us know who the cable company is, the internet, what day is trash, all the important things you need to know. They sent that back right away. We did one addendum on something silly, I can’t even remember what it was.

Signed it. Boom. Everything went as planned. The bank took care of everything. It was signed, funded, closed. I mean, it just clean the deal because everybody did what they were supposed to do and everybody was prepared up front. That’s it. And here I actually want you change the website, Drew, to start working on this.

What we do for people is we project manage real estate transactions. I think that’s a really big thing. And the other thing about us that I want people to realize is they say like, “How do you do it so cheap?” It’s because I don’t pay out massive commissions. It’s that simple guys. There it is. And we just project manage. We start in Slack and just goes there.

[00:19:03] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And you run a well oiled machine, I mean.

[00:19:06] Fred Glick: Yeah, and we’re gonna be working on getting AI to make it even more well oiled, and we’re really excited about that. So hopefully within a month or two everything’s just going.

[00:19:19] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I can’t even imagine where AI is gonna be in a month or two.

[00:19:22] Fred Glick: Oh, I know, I know. We’re all gonna have our, you know, 3D printers out printing our jet packs, I guess. No personification. That would be cool. Okay. There, there’s an AI challenge for one of your nerds.

[00:19:36] Drew Thomas Hendricks: AI jet pack.

[00:19:38] Fred Glick: There you go. Electric. So we’ll plug it in, you know.

[00:19:42] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:19:45] Fred Glick: E-bikes, e-cars, and e-jeeps.

[00:19:47] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I do have to say we took our, we have a Tesla and we went up to the wine country in Los Lebos for the weekend.

So this is our first like long 300 mile trip.

[00:19:57] Fred Glick: How’d to go?

[00:19:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Cost us $16 to get up there and $18 to get back.

[00:20:03] Fred Glick: Okay. So when you left your house, I assume you have a charger. So you were at what, 80 or 90%?

[00:20:09] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We went to the supercharger or the supercharger and got it all the way up to a hundred. And that gave you 323 miles.

[00:20:16] Fred Glick: And what that, that was how much it got. And what year and model do you have?

[00:20:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It’s a Tesla Y. I think it’s two years old.

[00:20:26] Fred Glick: Okay.

[00:20:27] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And then right in Los Alamos, we supercharged it all the way up to a hundred percent and got all the way back. I was impressed given I saw a bunch of gas stations at like eight, $9 a gallon.

[00:20:40] Fred Glick: Yeah. Oh, I know.

 Okay.

Real estate and electric vehicles and…

Well, it’s got a lot to do with, you know, car chargers and stuff in the home. And, you know, hey, it’s another nice little thing to put into your house before you leave, or at least a two 40 charger so somebody can plug it in.

It’s really kind of all you need.

[00:21:01] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, I think that’s been on our list. We still just have the regular, extension cord out there.

[00:21:09] Fred Glick: Off of 1-10?

[00:21:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, it’s a…

[00:21:13] Fred Glick: Just plug it into the wall behind you.

[00:21:15] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I think it charges like, I think four miles an hour. But if, you know, you go all night and you, you’re up to get another 40, 50 miles.

[00:21:24] Fred Glick: Yeah.

[00:21:25] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Still really has to go to the actual Tesla chargers that will trickle charge.

[00:21:30] Fred Glick: It works for you, but you know, it’s, it’s like the same kind of thing that you would get for a dryer, let’s say. So.

[00:21:42] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, it was on our list, but we haven’t needed to use it. It was, I’m surprised, I guess she doesn’t drive that much.

[00:21:49] Fred Glick: There you go. Even better for not having a gas car.

[00:21:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:21:53] Fred Glick: But I think it’s gonna start that people are finally gonna realize, you know what? I gotta get rid of this gas thing. It’s as your cars start dying, you’re gonna start picking up EVs or hybrids.

[00:22:04] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, this is the first time I’ve actually driven the car.

She’s had it for two years, but I’m always driving my other, my Jeep. So this is the first chance I actually drove. Got it. I have to say I was impressed. I saw the future, even though the future was two years ago.

[00:22:18] Fred Glick: There you go. There’s the quote. Even though the future was two years ago. Sounds like a line.

You picked it up from the movie somewhere.

[00:22:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Date myself.

[00:22:29] Fred Glick: Yep.

[00:22:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, this has been another episode of We Fixed Real Estate.k: Yep. Yes, we are.

[00:21:27] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well.

[00:21:27] Fred Glick: Okay. That’s enough of We Fixed Real Estate this week, everyone. See you next week.