Mike Heddle

It was quite a painful experience. The agent who came to me from Mike Heddle (Sue Aitken) provided me with flashy marketing booklets showing how their 4.5% commission includes everything "outstanding and exceptional" including "Outstanding Staging". Then she just sent me a text asking when a stager can come to see my home. When the stager came she just walked around the house chatting me up with her kind of fake niceness and gave no advice except for the color to use for painting the walls. The stager did not say a word about her terms of service and how much it cost. I did not want staging but since they said nothing about payment nor ask for my permission, I decided to accept the staging in order not to hinder the agent's job. When the stager finished the job, then she asked for my email to send an invoice to me. That was quite of a shock! Was it a deliberate dishonest way to upsell staging service to me or just utmost negligence toward the customer? So I had to pay about $1500 for the staging service which I actually did not want, I lost my whole day and energy on it and I am not sure still it was that helpful. I called Mike asking him why they included "Outstanding Staging" in the services included in their 4.5% commission in their flashy booklet, he said that actually it is only initial staging consultation that is free but not staging itself. Quite "accurate and honest" marketing booklet, right? The home was listed on July 7th, 2023 and during the whole week, there were few visits and no offers. During this whole time neither Mike nor Susan did not call me a single time and did not provide any update or advice. After one week of listing with few visits I asked Susan if it was okay to drop the price and she just quickly agreed without providing any advice. Two weeks after the listing, Mike Heddle called me saying he got an offer at this new lower price came and the buyer wanted me to accept it within a few hours. I asked him if I should possibly wait a little and see other offers and maybe sell the home at a slightly higher price but he told me that that would be rather unlikely in the current rising interest environment. He talked coldly and very little and did not provide any other advice. So as I wanted to sell my home within a month, I accepted the offer fearing not to sell it. I feel with some more effort, communication my home could have been sold maybe at 10K-15K higher price. Once the offer was accepted they immediately posted on this sign near my house: "Sold with outstanding results" which again was quite an exaggeration. I was quite annoyed by it. This whole experience was quite painful, I ended up selling my home below its fair market price and their dishonesty about staging was quite traumatizing as well. - Oleksiy Sayenko