Sleeping Bag Optional

We test-drive cars before buying. So shouldn’t we do the same with a home?

(Illustration by Shout)

Steve Edelman was shopping for a beach house – but before he made an offer, he wanted to stay overnight. Edelman, a San Francisco television producer, had gotten the idea from a 2005 New York Times story, which reported that a few high-end Manhattan brokers occasionally allowed would-be buyers to sleep over. The owner of the beach house, located just north of San Francisco, quickly agreed to the request – he routinely rented out the beach house anyway, so he was used to having strangers sleep in his bed. During his stay, in 2006, Edelman learned that the neighboring property tended to host noisy parties, but he liked the house so much he bought it anyway. He also liked the idea of giving a house for sale an overnight tryout and figured it might be a catchy concept for a television show. The result of that brainstorm is Sleep On It, which began airing on HGTV on Wednesday nights in January.

Since HGTV went on the air in 1994, it's had an underappreciated effect on the way we buy, sell, and treat our homes. The practice of staging houses – decluttering, rearranging furniture, and making cosmetic fixes to hasten their sale – existed long before the cable network thought of it, but it's been widely popularized by shows like Designed to Sell. There is now an entire industry of professional "redesigners" who, for a fee, do one-day room makeovers like the ones seen on TV. Likewise, in a soft housing market, the team behind Sleep On It says the practice of overnight home shopping seems likely to catch on, too. On the show, couples walk the neighborhood during their stay in the home, casually meeting neighbors. They listen to nighttime traffic. They do a deep-dive into the house, learning things that might not be obvious on a quick walkthrough. (Example: The way the bathroom door closes makes it hard to blow-dry your hair in front of the mirror.) "You spend more time with your automobile before you buy it than you do with a house," says series producer Michael McInerney. "The most common thing we heard from people [on the show] was 'I can't believe people buy a house without doing this. . . . This should be something everybody does.'"

But plenty of brokers think it's a terrible idea. "We're not selling time shares here," says Terry Maitland, a high-end broker with LandVest in Boston. Maitland is all in favor of prospective buyers making repeated visits to a property to see it at different times of the day. But he'd tell his sellers to reject a request for an overnight stay. At best, it's an invasion of privacy. At worst, the buyers will find some reason not to purchase the house, and word may spread among realtors of some hidden flaw. Maitland recalls one suburban buyer who'd contracted to purchase a house and persuaded the owner to let him sleep over before the closing. That weekend, a nearby airport, which normally produced little noise, held its annual air show; the visiting buyer said it sounded like F-16s were strafing the house. He voided the sale, and to Maitland it became a cautionary tale. "Only bad things can happen," he says.

Pros who sell newly built homes may be a little more accommodating. Since their model homes are unoccupied, there are no privacy concerns. At Pinehills at Plymouth, managing partner Tony Green says the average buyer already makes six visits to the community before putting down a deposit. But if a serious buyer wanted to spend the night, Green says many of the Pinehills builders would likely consider it. So, too, at Nouvelle at Natick, the new 215-unit condo complex above Natick's new shopping mall. That complex won't be ready for occupancy until late summer or this fall, but once units are ready, director of sales Jane Sheehy says her staff might entertain an overnight request from a serious, qualified buyer.

I understand the benefits of an extended visit. While reporting my book House Lust, I persuaded a Las Vegas builder to let me do a sleepover in a model home. Standing in the upstairs loft late at night, I enjoyed seeing the lights of the Strip from the window. Given the freedom to spend hours walking amid the rooms, without interruption from other buyers, I got a better feel for room sizes and how the house would work. There was no Aha! moment, but since most house hunters tend to visit a blur of multiple homes a day, the biggest advantage was the chance to isolate my attention on this one house. I'm sympathetic toward realtors who don't want to turn their listings into bed-and-breakfasts. But if I were selling my house and a qualified buyer put in a solid offer with an overnight stay as one of the contingencies, would I consider it? Absolutely.

Daniel McGinn is a Boston-based national correspondent at Newsweek and the author of House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes. E-mail him at dan@houselustthebook.com.