Leslie Whitlock Staging

This person came up as a recommendation as a stager when we were selling our house. We were in a hurry to put it on the market and he was the only one who said he could get things ready within a few days. There were major red flags from the beginning but unfortunately we went with him because of the timeline. 1) You will take a big risk if you hire him as his team is uninsured. 2) You will never get a refund if you are unhappy with his work because he demands the full amount upfront without compromises. 3) He promises A LOT and talks A LOT but when time comes to act, he hardly delivers half of what he promised. 4) We needed the house deep-cleaned, he said for $500 he could get his cleaner to do it along with some moving work. Since we were going to hire house cleaners for $300, we agreed to have his cleaning people do the job. He delivered ONE cleaner for a 2,150 sq/ft house who did not bring a vacuum cleaner. The cleaner was the nicest lady who did a very good job on half of the house, the other half she simply did not have time to clean because Leslie did not want to pay her for an extra day. We ended up with a half-cleaned house. We also overheard them arguing in Spanish with the cleaning lady who was concerned about the timeline and the amount of work but who was told that she was not allowed to come back to complete the job. At the end of the job, he agreed to refund $300 for the dismal cleaning work. Then when the time came to refund the money he claimed that he never agreed to refund $300 and that we were LYING. Then he proceeded to threaten to lodge a mechanics lien on the house and disrupt the escrow if we didn't immediately release his furniture. He ended up refunding $150. This was ugly beyond belief! 5) At Leslie's direction his assistant used some cleaning chemical on the white tile walls of the bathroom that turned them yellow in color. Because Leslie refused to bring the cleaner back to take the yellow stain off the walls, we had to spend several hours that night cleaning the walls ourselves, and his response to our concerns about the half-completed job was "Then you got work to do tonight!", i.e. if you want that cleaned, you better do it yourselves. 6) The staging was passable. Not surprisingly he promised to use "fresh towels" in the bathroom, and ended up using our own used not washed towels as the final work product. Moreover, he used a lot of our own pillows and accessories which was not the expectation. Classic oversell. 7) Leslie juggles multiple jobs at the same time and is always on the run, but always finds time to carry a meaningless conversation about nothing. Time wasted that could easily be spent on addressing issues and directing his team. 8) After the house was sold, Leslie texted and let us know that he wants to pick up his furniture THE NEXT DAY. No courtesy call, no coordination, no "is it convenient?". After a contentious back-and-forth he decided that the appropriate solution was CUSSING. We had never seen this type of unprofessional behavior! 9) His behavior is very erratic, he constantly seems up and down. I get that his job is stressful but if he cannot handle it, he should be doing something else. When our realtor got dragged into this mess and confronted him about being unprofessional, Leslie's response was that he is "very stressed" and that he juggles multiple jobs. His solution seems to be that his clients should be paying for his stress by being cussed at and disrespected.