Woman Wears Panda Suit to Sell a House

Published

August 14, 2018

Jill Krasny is a former editor for Credit.com. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, The Financial Times and Travel + Leisure.

A lot of time and paperwork goes into selling a home. So when Jessica Arnett, co-owner of Villa Real Estate in Texas, decided to draw more eyes to a listing, let’s just say she went above and beyond.

Arnett, who’s based in Houston, was fed up with the lack of traffic to one listing in the nearby suburb of Spring. The home, located at 22427 High Point Pines Dr., had been on the market for three weeks, she told the Houston Chronicle, and in that time, it had only received two showings.

Oddly enough, the seller told Arnett that he’d heard of a guy in Canada who posed in a panda costume for the listing photos. The gimmick apparently worked, so she decided to do the same thing.

Within a day of the new listing going up, she received several requests for showings and “tons of calls” from fellow Realtors who approved of the tactic, the Chronicle reported.

“Realtors asked me where I got the panda costume,” Arnett told the paper. “I said, ‘Don’t steal my idea!'”

If buying a home is in your future, make sure you know where your credit stands, as this will help determine what kind of mortgage and terms you may qualify for. (You can read more about why you should check your credit before trying to buy a home here.) Once you’ve studied up, you can view two of your credit scores, updated every 14 days, for free on Credit.com.

Credit not up to snuff? You may able to improve your score by paying down debt, disputing any errors you find on your credit report with the appropriate credit reporting agency and limiting any inquiries for new credit until your score has bounced back.