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Home Sellers Protect Your Privacy

July 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Do you think your secrets are safe? Before your home goes on the market and home buyers start to walk through, savvy sellers will need to relocate any confidential information. Even so, you might be astonished to learn what home buyers can figure out about you.

Put All Private Documents In a Safe Place

  • Is opening a drawer snooping?

What if the drawer is part of an integrated kitchen cabinet. Buyers may innocently tug on a drawer to inspect its depth and find important documents that you do not want anyone to see. Lets just say a buyer opened a drawer and saw the seller’s net sheet or market analysis sitting in plain view. It clearly indicated a lower price was expected, so you can guess what the buyer would have offered.

  • Never leave your mail where anybody can find it.

Many sellers leave lots of mail stacked carefully on the kitchen counter. Buyers can find out how much you owe on your credit cards. They can tell if you’re late on your mortgage payments. They must believe that buyers will not read their mail, even when the mail is stored on the refrigerator door, screaming to be read.

Has anyone entered a vacant home where the mail was tossed all over the floor in the entryway. Neither the seller nor his agent bothered to stop by and pick up the mail. Its not hard to figure out that much of the mail contained collection notices. If a buyer is armed with that information, guess what price the buyer will be thinking about. It won’t be list price.

Remove Graduation Certificates and Wedding Photos from the Wall

Not all personal items should be removed, sometimes sellers overlook the obvious and leave diplomas on the wall. People do form biases unfortunately and can carry them way too far. For instance, the seller might be a district attorney, and there are buyers who might not feel comfortable buying a home from them because of a past experience with an attorney. For whatever reasons. Your diploma also can give away a close estimate of your age. If a buyer sees a recent diploma, for example, the buyer might assume the seller is buried in student loans and needs to sell to pay them off.

Your wedding photos might give away the your religion, as do certain religious relics left in the home. Buyers can be prejudiced. Do not give buyers a way to form opinions about you. Do not let buyers form their ideas about you from the type of music you like or the literature you read.

Skeletons In The Closet

Often sellers who are separating or getting divorced feels a lot of pressure to sell quickly, especially if the partner who stays in the home cannot afford to continue to afford it. This is not information sellers should be sharing with the buyers. But they do. They may as well toss their list price right out the window.

It is nobody’s business, in fact, even if the seller is getting out of a relationship. But when the buyer finds a seller desperate to sell, the buyer never offers the list price. So do not leave any telltale signs that can give any reason you must sell.

Before putting your house on the market, please start the preparations, a few boxes, empty drawers, closets and everything and anything remotely personal. If your house to talk to a buyer, simply say the wrong things.