That was just the icing on the cake – talk about giving buyers confidence that they are buying a good home!

The great thing is that our inspection report (by our inspector) perfectly matched the other one. That was very reassuring.

P.S. I agree with the above advice to ditch the scented candles & stick with the fresh fruit & flowers. My mother-in-law looked at a house and had to run outside because she was having an asthma attack brought on by the candles! Never good! Plus, heavily scented candles made me feel like there were odors that needed to be very covered up.

-we only saw one home that was close to staged condition (and I refused to buy it because the living room wouldn’t fit a full-sized sofa and the location didn’t work). As between “way too much crap” and empty rooms, empty rooms win hands-down.
-bad paint colors don’t help, but dirty walls are way worse.
-the house we bought had the worst color scheme I have ever seen. But there’s no paint color on earth that I hate the way I hate beige. I might not REFUSE to buy a house because it had beige walls, but it would be a hurdle. But I may be a minority…perhaps.
-people should kill the spiders in their basements, and any other critters. I had to go in the attic and the basement if I was considering buying the house, and I HATE spiders.

And one actual “tip” I can pass on: realtors, manage communications with your clients. Before we got our own realtor, we were calling listing brokers to show us houses. (Of course they’ll oblige – they want to sell us the house.) We looked at one place that had suffered from major neglect for DECADES. The realtors must have known it was way overpriced (the homeowner was emotionally attached because his late mother raised the family there), but they beat the drum about not dropping the price at all (and sold it for way under listing – not to us). We had some serious questions about what was going on with the place. (One of these was why there was an empty gallon jug hanging on a makeshift hook from an exposed water pipe in the upstairs bathroom. My theory was that the homeowner was filling it from the sink because the toilet wouldn’t flush otherwise.) So I sent my list of questions to the realtor. He forwarded them without reading them. Should I have worded them sweetly (rather than clearly) so they would be palatable to the seller? Sure. I was blunt because the realtor was one of those hand-wave guys – oh, no, these cracks in the plaster don’t mean anything, that’s just “character.” Turns out the gallon jug was there for some sort of eco-friendly gray-water reclamation project; I learned this from the seller when he emailed me back. He was obviously deeply offended. He had overpriced his house a lot, and to sell it to anyone, he needed to be disposed to negotiate. At that point, he was definitely not disposed to negotiate with me. Had his realtor called him to relay my questions (minus my explanation of why I thought they were serious enough to get actual answers), things might have gone very differently. He ultimately sold the house (it took a few more months), but I thought that was phenomenally stupid of his realtor.