When you’re selling your home, you’re basically attempting to get as many strangers as you can to come and walk through the place, while you’re not there! That is if you are having open house inspections.
Below are some helpful guidelines to maintain your privacy while your property is for sale.
De-personalise everything
It’s a great idea to present your property as much as you can so that the prospective buyers can imagine themselves living in it. Getting rid of anything from view that tells people the place is ‘yours’ makes this happen, and at the same time it protects your privacy because you are putting away from sight anything that gives information away about your living circumstances.
Magazines, photos, books – they can all give buyers clues as to your beliefs or personality…to keep this from biasing the buying process and to let the sale of the house stand alone based on the quality of it, put these types of things from view.
Personal documents
A lot of people think that putting personal documents away in cupboards or drawers will keep them from prying eyes during an inspection, but people coming through the home are actually entitled to look in these spaces to check the dimensions of the storage space in the house.
Imagine someone having a quick peek in a drawer and seeing the home’s property valuation sitting there! That gives them an obvious advantage. The best policy is to put sensitive documents in a locked cabinet or off the premises entirely.
Allowing potential buyers to see your personal mail can again give them an advantage in the buying process. Things like bank and credit card statements, and of course mortgage statements can give the prospective buyer too much information so get them out of sight.
If the house is now vacant after you were living in it, remember to clear away any mail that has arrived for you after you left or there might be a pile of it waiting for the potential buyers to see.
Your bedroom
The bedroom is often the most personal room in the house and can give away a lot of information about you to a prospective buyer. If the closet is only half full for example yet there are photos of a couple and children everywhere, buyers might catch on that the sale is because of a divorce and that you want to sell as quickly as possible. They’ll no doubt drop their offer as a result.
Go through the bedroom and make it as de-personalised as possible so as to give away as little information about you as you can.
