How far can a seller go when staging a house for sale?

If the myriad home shows on HGTV have taught us anything, it's that staging a home can do wonders for attracting a buyer. Carefully arranged furniture, pictures, other furnishings and tchotchkes can whet the imaginations of prospective buyers and increases the likelihood that a house will get sold. 

A 2019 survey of sellers' real estate agents conducted by the National Association of Realtors confirms the value of staging. Twenty-two percent of sellers' agents surveyed believed that staging increased the dollar value of a home on the market by 1 to 5%. Another 17% believed it increased the value by 6 to 10%. Five percent believed it ballooned the value by 11 to 15%. And 2% of respondents believed it increased a home's value by a whopping 16 to 20%. Only 19% of those agents responded that staging had no effect on a home's value. Thirty-three percent of sellers' agents were unsure whether staging had any effect at all.

A recent question from a reader wonders how far staging can and should go to shine a favorable light on a house. There are regulations from state to state that make it clear that sellers must not conceal problems in a house that might affect a prospective buyer's health including disclosure about lead paint. And it would be wrong to try to cover up or mislead prospective buyers about mold, termites, wood rot, or other major issues. But this question had more to do with a cosmetic fix than a major house issue and the reader wanted to know if a seller crossed a line.

"I saw a posting on a social media site where a seller asked if she could borrow a piece of artwork about two feet by three feet to hang over her circuit breaker cabinet," the reader writes. "She mentioned that it was the first thing you see when you walk into her house and she didn't want to draw any potential buyers' attention to it."

The reader found the request troubling and wanted to know if it was ethical to engage in what she thought might be a deceptive maneuver to hide one of the less-attractive features of the house she was trying to sell.

There is absolutely nothing unethical about  trying to make a property for sale appear as attractive as possible when trying to sell it. Any responsible buyer and certainly any home inspector is going to ask to take a look at the electrical box in a home, even if a prospective buyer has no real idea of what he or she is looking at. Having to move a piece of art to get to the box might be a hassle, but if hanging it there is more appealing than leaving it bare, then the seller seems wise to consider doing so. The right thing when staging a house is to try to make it as appealing as possible but to stop short of lying to prospective buyers about the condition of the house. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

How fair should a reader be to a son's roommate who left her in the lurch?

Learning to live with roommates in college can be challenging. Toss those roommates' parents into the mix and things can get far more complicated. 

A reader we're calling Elizabeth emailed seeking advice about the right thing to do after her son's roommate situation went awry. When Elizabeth's son, who was attending college away from home, and his roommate found an apartment to rent, they needed a cosigner on their lease. Elizabeth agreed to serve as the cosigner, making her responsible if the rent went unpaid.

"The other student's parents agreed to send me his half of the rent monthly," wrote Elizabeth. The contract was a verbal one among the folks.

All apparently went well. The roommate's parents sent Elizabeth a check and she paid the full rent. But with a month left on the lease, the roommate decided to move.

Elizabeth writes that she was "on the hook" for the full remaining month's rent. The roommate's parents indicated that they had no intention of paying for an apartment where their son no longer lived. Eventually, Elizabeth's daughter decided to sublet the roommate's apartment for the remaining month. Elizabeth may have been paying the full rent for the apartment, but at least her daughter got to live there for the remaining month so the room didn't go unoccupied.

The lease ended and both of her children moved out, and Elizabeth is now expecting a rebate check from the apartment's owner for the deposit they had left for their two key fobs when they rented the apartment.

As part of the original verbal agreement, both her son and his roommate (well, their parents actually) paid that initial deposit. But Elizabeth believes that the roommate's parents may have forfeited any right to a share of that key fob deposit when he left before the lease was up.

"Would it be wrong to keep their deposit?" Elizabeth asked.

I regularly remind readers that I am not a real estate attorney, a contracts specialist or a lawyer of any type. But if Elizabeth is looking for some thoughts on the right thing to do, I can try to help.

First, let Elizabeth's experience be another reminder that in financial relationships, it's best to be clear upfront about the specifics of the relationship. Elizabeth cosigning the lease places the onus on her to come up with the money once the roommate broke his part of the lease. It also means that the deposit money is likely to be returned to her when the lease is up.

If the roommate's parents had agreed to pay for his portion of the rent for the duration of the lease even if he left a month early, the right thing would have been for them to pay it. If Elizabeth was fine not pressing that issue because she was able to rent that room for her daughter, that seems a fair decision.

With the key fobs deposit, if the original verbal agreement was that each roommate (or his parents) would get half of the deposit back when the lease was up, it seems fair to honor that even if Elizabeth remains a bit miffed about the roommate's early departure. I'm not convinced she has to do this, but it seems the right thing to do. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Can I use my company Zoom for personal matters?

Since last March, many people, including me, have started working remotely in an effort to avoid catching or spreading the novel coronavirus. I have not set foot in my office on campus since March 13 of last year, just before we were about to have a week off for spring break.

Instead of a break, however, many of us used spring break week to offer voluntary classes to students over Zoom, the platform we were shifting to to teach remotely for the rest of the semester. Partly this move helped to keep students connected even when they couldn't return to campus. But a real benefit for those of us teaching who had limited experience using Zoom was to enable us to get used to the platform and see how we could use it most effectively to reconfigure the in-person courses we had been teaching. That increased familiarity certainly helped as online learning continued through fall and into the following spring.

We were not alone in our Zoom usage during this time period. On a blog post to users last April, Zoom's CEO Eric S. Yuan reported that usage of his company's product had shot up dramatically. We may have gone virtual, but we are certainly in good company.

During this time of learning to to teach virtually, several readers have emailed me to some version of this question: "Is it wrong to use the Zoom account I have via my employer for personal use?"

Most recently, I got this inquiry from a college professor who explained that last year she used her employer's Zoom account mostly for work with the exception of the few times she used it for personal use including giving presentations and attending a memorial service. She prefers her college's Zoom account because her free personal account limits meetings to 40 minutes.

I believe that companies who want their employees to get comfortable using Zoom for business purposes would be wise to encourage their employees to use the company's Zoom account for personal meetings as long as they don't use it for illegal or abusive activity. But ultimately it's up to a company to make its usage policy clear, just as it is a company's call whether to permit employees to use company email or a company computer to browse non-work-related websites.

If a company is going to require employees to work remotely, the right thing is for them to lay out the ground rules for employees about Zoom usage up front.

Employees should remember, however, that if they use a company's Zoom account, it's more than likely that a company IT person can review usage and meeting activity, just like IT ca review company email usage. If employees use their company Zoom accounts responsibly, I still believe that the right thing for companies to do is to let them but to make clear that it's OK and what restrictions, if any, they should follow. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Received a stimulus check intended for a deceased relative? Return it.

When the first round of stimulus checks for $1,200 went out to people in 2020, it was estimated that 1.1 million dead people received checks. That added up to around $1.4 billion. 

John Waggoner, a senior writer for AARP, posed the question, "My Dead Relative Received a Stimulus Check? Can We Keep It?" in an article he wrote for the organization's website. The Internal Revenue Service may have told people receiving checks in the name of dead people to return them, but the rules were unclear.

While the stimulus checks were clearly not intended for dead people, Waggoner points out that the "Treasury and the IRS didn't use death records to stop payments to dead people because the IRS did not think they had the authority to deny payments to those who filed a 2019 tax return, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO)." The CARES Act "required them to distribute the checks as quickly as possible."

As the rules at the time about keeping the money were being sorted out, some people were trying to decide if they should return the money if they didn't have to. Waggoner asked me what the ethical if not the legal thing to do was.

"Most if not all of those people who received a check intended for a dead relative know that it was an error," I told him. "The stimulus money was not intended to go to dead people. Ethically, the right thing would be to not cash the check."

I stand by that response. If we know we received something of value in error or that someone else received something of value and we stand to reap the benefits we should return that something.

Now, a new round of stimulus checks has gone out to eligible people. As Waggoner points out in an updated article on the topic, the Treasury and IRS corrected its original error. "The legislation that authorized the second stimulus payment to eligible recipients says that only recipients who died in 2019 or earlier must return the payments," Waggoner writes.

If a stimulus check to a dead relative is received in error, return it. Waggoner provides step-by-step instructions in his article about how to make such a return.

In the past, I've written about people taking food or clothing intended for those in need because there were no rules to keep them from doing so even when they clearly were not the items' intended beneficiaries. The temptation might exist to get a little something for yourself simply because you can, most of us know that there is little justification for doing so. The same goes for trying to keep stimulus checks intended for those who might have qualified for them while alive, but not so much after they've died.

The pandemic has taken a toll on most people in some form, but there are some who truly need more help than others. Yes, the federal government should have been more careful in issuing the checks. But the resources intended to support American citizens should not be wrongly kept by others simply because an error was made. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.