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Home Buyers Get Ahead of Supply-Chain Issues by Purchasing the House and
Everything Inside
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BuyRent






HOME BUYERS GET AHEAD OF SUPPLY-CHAIN ISSUES BY PURCHASING THE HOUSE AND
EVERYTHING INSIDE


ONE COUPLE IN CALIFORNIA PAID $30,000 FOR ALL OF THE SELLER’S FURNITURE SO THEY
WOULDN’T HAVE TO ‘SIT IN AN EMPTY HOUSE’

By Katherine Clarke
 |  Originally Published On January 26, 2023  |  The Wall Street Journal
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1 of 19
 
 
A colorful property in Simpsonville, S.C., sold last year for around $9 million.
The buyers also purchased the furniture.
Ben Ivins of Ben Ivins Media
1 of 19

A colorful property in Simpsonville, S.C., sold last year for around $9 million.
The buyers also purchased the furniture.
Ben Ivins of Ben Ivins Media
1 of 19
•••••

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Last year, Gerardo and Rita Luna upgraded from their roughly 2,700-square-foot
home in Oxnard, Calif., to a much larger house in nearby Santa Paula, paying
$2.4 million. The couple, who own four automotive repair facilities, said they
had been looking for a quieter place, where they wouldn’t be able to “shake
their neighbors’ hands through the window,” Mr. Luna said. The Santa Paula
estate, on 6 acres, fit the bill perfectly. 

The only problem: how could they possibly furnish such a large property? They
didn’t have nearly enough furniture to fill the nearly 7,000-square-foot house,
and what they did have didn’t fit the French Country style of their new home.
Plus, they knew that global supply-chain issues would likely make buying new
furniture difficult and time-consuming. Instead, Mr. Luna proposed an unusual
solution: They offered to buy all of the seller’s furniture, although the heavy
draperies and plaid upholstery didn’t exactly fit their taste.

“We knew that it would take us perhaps years to fill the house with furniture,”
said Mr. Luna, 45. “So, even though it didn’t totally fit our vibe, we felt it
made sense. We didn’t want to sit in an empty house.”



More: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Miami Rental Set to Sell for $17 Million

The seller was downsizing to a new home nearby and agreed to sell her furniture
to the Lunas for about $30,000, “pennies on the dollar,” compared with the
original prices, said the Lunas’ real-estate agent, Victoria Adam of LIV
Sotheby’s International Realty.

It’s a good thing she did. A new dining table the Lunas ordered for the house
took six months to arrive, while a new sofa took three. “In the meantime, we had
a sofa to sit on,” Mr. Luna said. 

THE BAR AREA IN THE LUNAS’ HOME.

Amanda Villarosa for The Wall Street Journal

THE LUNAS’ NEW HOUSE MEASURES ABOUT 7,000 SQUARE FEET.

Amanda Villarosa for The Wall Street Journal

In the past, it was common for properties in second-home or resort communities
to be sold with the furniture included, but primary homes were traditionally
delivered empty. Since the onset of the pandemic, however, more home buyers are
making offers to purchase properties fully furnished, real-estate agents said.
With supply-chain delays and other logistical issues leaving buyers waiting
months or even years for their new furniture, agents said, purchasing the
sellers’ furniture is much more appealing than it used to be.

Developer Rick Rosemarin said he encountered this desperation firsthand last
year, when he was trying to sell a roughly $10 million estate he built in
Greenwich, Conn. It turned out that one would-be buyer who toured the modern
estate was just trolling for furniture. The buyer said the house wasn’t for him,
but asked if he could purchase all the furniture for another home he was buying.
“That was hysterical,” said Mr. Rosemarin, 37.

More: Five Wine Countries Ripe for the Picking

While Mr. Rosemarin wouldn’t part with the furniture—it took him close to a year
to furnish the house with supply-chain delays—he said didn’t blame the man. “The
time frame for some of these deliveries was a joke,” Mr. Rosemarin said. “To
this day, we still have a table we ordered in 2021 that hasn’t been delivered.”

AT ONE57 IN NEW YORK CITY, A FULLY FURNISHED APARTMENT RECENTLY SOLD FOR $34.5
MILLION.

Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket/Getty Images

When he did sell the property in December 2022, the buyers—a family from
overseas—wanted most of the furniture, and paid a premium for it, Mr. Rosemarin
said, although he declined to say how much. “They initially wanted to order
their own for a few rooms, but when they found out from their interior designer
how long it would take, they ended up buying more from us.”

Buyers are also increasingly asking to purchase the rental furniture that many
owners use to “stage” their homes for sale. Home-stager Robert Sablic of Quadra
said his company recently furnished a four-bedroom apartment asking $45 million
at Manhattan’s One57 condominium. “Shark Tank” star Robert Herjavec made an
offer to buy the condo for $34.5 million, but only if the rental furniture was
included.

‘SHARK TANK’ STAR ROBERT HERJAVEC.

Christopher Willard/ABC/Getty Images

Such instances used to be unusual, Mr. Sablic said, since high-end buyers often
preferred to have all new furniture rather than used pieces that had been
shifted from place to place by the staging company. They also present a
challenge for stagers, who want to keep their clients happy but also have to
quickly re-source and purchase new items for their own inventory, while dealing
with supply-chain issues themselves. 



Andrew Bowen, partner at ASH Staging, said as a result of the surge in demand,
his company recently started renting staged furniture to buyers for a year, so
that they could have a place to sit and sleep while waiting for their own items
to arrive. 

Other buyers, however, simply fall in love with the sellers’ furniture.

THE LOS ANGELES SHOW HOUSE OF ASH STAGING, WHICH HAS SEEN AN INCREASE IN THE
NUMBER OF BUYERS LOOKING FOR FULLY FURNISHED HOMES.

Christian Harder/ASH Staging

THE ASH SHOW HOUSE.

Christian Harder/ASH Staging

Last year, real-estate agent Joan Herlong made a deal to sell a house in
suburban Simpsonville, S.C., for about $9 million, a record for the area. The
only glitch: the buyers loved the sellers’ eclectic, colorful furniture, which
wasn’t for sale. The sellers planned to take everything with them to a new home
they were building in nearby Greenville.

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Once the deal was in contract, the buyers convinced the sellers to part with
their furniture, Ms. Herlong said. She said she doesn’t know how much they paid
for the furniture, but believes it could have been a seven-figure sum. Thinking
it might be fun to “order all new stuff,” the sellers moved out with only a few
suitcases, she said, leaving nearly their whole lives behind. 

“Sometimes people don’t want to just buy your house, they want to buy your whole
lifestyle,” Ms. Herlong said. The sellers did, however, draw the line when the
buyer wanted their pet cows, too. “I’m not a cattle broker,” Ms. Herlong
quipped. 

More: Sweetening the Pot, Steve Wynn Chops $15 Million off His Beverly Hills
Megamansion

When New York City media executive Andy Plesser, 71, started hunting for a
weekend home in Connecticut’s Litchfield County, he wasn’t planning on buying a
fully furnished house. But when he saw the home of Eric and Liz Macaire, he fell
for their furnishings.

Mr. Macaire, 60, a restaurateur, and Ms. Macaire, a 54-year-old interior
designer, had curated the home with items such as a set of 1940s bowling
benches, a yellow settee that once belonged to Ms. Macaire’s socialite aunt, and
an antique dough maker from a Paris flea market. There was also a pair of 19th
century English “half moon” tables, an antique gold-framed beveled mirror and a
cubist painting above the fireplace. “They were things that couldn’t easily be
replicated or replaced,” said Mr. Plesser. He bought the house in November 2022
for $1.25 million, and made an unsolicited offer to buy all the furniture. 

The Macaires were amenable to selling everything but a few sentimental items for
$17,000, said Lenore Mallett of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty, a
real-estate agent who worked on the deal. They were downsizing anyway, Mr.
Macaire said, and some of the pieces would have been challenging to move. “It’s
a compliment that people want the pieces we chose,” Mr. Macaire said.

ANDY PLESSER AND ARTY AT THE LAKEVILLE HOME.

Landon Speers for The Wall Street Journal

While he didn’t buy the furniture for convenience so much as admiration for the
sellers’ tastes, Mr. Plesser said it was also nice to have the pieces in place
immediately, rather than waiting for new furniture to be delivered. 

More: Taking the Caveman out of the ‘Man Cave’

Dallas real-estate agent Cindi Caudle of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International
Realty sold a roughly $2 million, two-bedroom pied-à-terre last year at the HALL
Arts Residences condominium. The buyer, from California, wanted all the staged
furniture, including small details like the Hermès blankets and decorative bowls
on the countertop. When the deal closed, Ms. Caudle said she removed what she
thought were throwaway staging items, including plastic lemons from a wooden
bowl; they hadn’t used real lemons to avoid them going bad. When the buyer
arrived in his new home, however, he quickly called Ms. Caudle to ask that the
lemons be returned.

REAL-ESTATE AGENT CINDI CAUDLE RECENTLY SOLD A FULLY FURNISHED APARTMENT AT THE
HALL ARTS RESIDENCES CONDOMINIUM IN DALLAS.

Robert Tsai

“I thought I was doing him a favor, that he wouldn’t want those nasty things,”
she said. Instead, “I felt like the lemon thief. The lemon thief who came in the
middle of the night.”

Sometimes, disputes over furniture and other add-ons can threaten to derail a
deal. Greenwich real-estate agent Amanda Miller of Houlihan Lawrence said she
almost had a multimillion-dollar deal fall through over a dispute about outdoor
furniture cushions. “It can be the couch that breaks the deal, sometimes,” she
said. To avoid these kinds of snafus, agents recommend sealing the deal for a
property first, then turning to negotiations over furniture. 

“Sometimes, folks can get emotional and stuck over stupid things, like a bureau
or something,” said Evelyn Tilney of Kienlen Lattmann Sotheby’s International
Realty in New Jersey. “I like to keep them separate so that if the furniture
falls through, it doesn’t jam up the whole deal.”

Agents said they also recommend a separate bill of sale for the furniture, since
mortgage lenders don’t want to have to determine the value of the furniture for
the purposes of financing.

Ms. Herlong said she once had an eccentric buyer make an offer contingent on the
seller parting with his two dogs. The lender’s appraiser wanted to charge extra
for researching the resale market for Jack Russell terriers. 



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United States


PARK CITY, UT

$8,295,000
United States


DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, FL

$5,999,000
United States


OCEAN CITY, NJ

$8,695,000
United States


RIVERSIDE, CT

$5,950,000
United States


MIAMI, FL

$5,000,000
United States


OSTERVILLE, MA

$6,950,000
United States


MONTECITO, CA

$5,975,000
United States


SANTA BARBARA, CA

$5,295,000
United States


BURGETTSTOWN, PA

$8,500,000
United States


PARK CITY, UT

$19,300,000
United States


PARK CITY, UT

$8,295,000
United States


DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, FL

$5,999,000
United States


OCEAN CITY, NJ

$8,695,000
United States


RIVERSIDE, CT

$5,950,000
United States


MIAMI, FL

$5,000,000
United States


OSTERVILLE, MA

$6,950,000
United States


MONTECITO, CA

$5,975,000
United States


SANTA BARBARA, CA

$5,295,000
United States


BURGETTSTOWN, PA

$8,500,000
United States


PARK CITY, UT

$19,300,000
United States


PARK CITY, UT

$8,295,000
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